


An Archaeology of Affection

by rauchblau



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Fluff, Fluff and a little Angst, Friends to Lovers, Gen, Getting Together, M/M, Relationship Study, Sleepovers, Slow Burn, Texting, boy so slow, enough tropes to win the iwaoi bingo in at least one way i think, in the last chapter, inconsistent narrative perspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-06-08 01:50:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6833980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rauchblau/pseuds/rauchblau
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Hajime, it is a riddle and simultaneously so evident. It fills his chest, surging like water, paints heat up his neck. In retrospect, it eats up his days, makes them its own until it feels like his heart has always been in his throat at the smile thrown over Oikawa’s shoulder, the stilling of his fingers on Hajime’s sleeve. He spends weeks unravelling, unearthing, going further back with each examined feeling that is the same as the one before, until he thinks that beginnings are hardly what matters.</p>
<p>Their beginning stretches out and back, impossible to trace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Delimitations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cutiepiehinata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cutiepiehinata/gifts).



> For Cutiepiehinata, who introduced me to Haikyuu, and who told me she'd be proud to be credited for supplying more or less subconscious, but constant inspiration for Oikawa's mannerisms at any age - with thanks.
> 
> This started out as a silly comfort fic full of my favourite tropes to distract me from studying for my final exam, but I am apparently incapable of not taking everything seriously - so before I knew it, I had a 20k attempt at a relationship study with most of the silliness edited out. Please enjoy, but be warned: when I say slow burn, I _mean it_.

Ever since Tooru has been very small, he has been acutely aware of how the world moves with purpose and ambition. It’s in the small green buds struggling free and persisting in the biting winds of a winter suddenly returned, in the way the little old woman from the fruit shop on the corner straightens out her back after hauling in a crate of apples, and on every dewy morning it is there in the narrow glistening tracks crossing the garden path, witnesses of hundreds of dogged journeys from patch of grass to patch of grass.

Tooru himself is no stranger to it either, has known it intimately as long as he can think back. It has possibly clung to him since some insignificant thing he did made his parents proud and he grasped for the first time the distinct connection between accomplishment and praise, praise and affection.

His parents are loving, but rarely physically affectionate, even less so when he gets older. Maybe this is why he clings to Hajime, at first. Hajime reprimands him, provokes him, insults him, but always touches him (a jab in the side, a whack over the head, a pull on the sleeve), and Tooru is starved for touch. And, he realizes, Hajime might complain and mutter, but he allows Tooru to lean on him, allows him to hook his fingers under the hem of his jumper to let himself be dragged along. Hajime pushes him off once, habitually, but never a second time. And Tooru always dives back in.

He doesn’t remember first meeting Hajime, and neither do Hajime himself or their respective mothers. The only certain thing is that it happened early on in one of their living rooms, and dissolved from there into a myriad of photographed fragments of memory, two babies sleeping under a kotatsu, two toddlers in a garden sharing a slice of watermelon, two boys chasing each other with water pistols, smiles as wide as the stretch of sky above. The easiest thing to say would be that they have always been together.

Where memory territory begins, it is rough and blotchy like an early cartographer’s work, events misproportioned and agents confused, with blank spaces in between. If Hajime and Tooru were to compare these mental maps, they would no doubt find differing accounts. Still, there are some moments or days that are uneventful in themselves, but grow in retrospective to decisively influence two lives; capital cities on their maps, not placed on exactly the same spots, but bolded and circled in red all the same.

Two of those are so early that neither Hajime nor Tooru can say with any certainty which one was first and might have therefore influenced or brought about the other. In fact, they have fused in such a way that sometimes they seem inseparable, one eponymous for the other. Thus, during their graduation speech in middle school Tooru can suddenly lean over and whisper fiercely how glad he is to go to Aoba Johsai with Hajime, because “I can’t imagine not playing volleyball with you”; and Hajime can understand correctly that Tooru always means both: their volleyball, and them.

So here are the two, the introduction of a _them_ , and the introduction of volleyball.

Here is the pale morning (promises of brightness glinting on the petals of the plum tree in Hajime’s back garden) that sees Tooru crouched in the grass in his pyjamas, a wet spot on his backside from where he’s been sitting down on the patio without thinking. His head is bowed intently, motionless, and his shoulders are hunched. Hajime, looking down at him from the window of his upper-story bedroom, thinks he must be crying.

They are almost six; Tooru’s parents are out of town for the night, another one of those important business dinners that make Tooru a regular sleepover guest at the Iwaizumi family’s home. Their evenings are cheerful enough, but a vague, terrible fear of abandonment often takes hold of Tooru during the nights or in the mornings. He battles it stubbornly, but it can only be temporarily relieved by breakfast or Hajime’s hand in his, and discarded only by the sound of his parents’ car pulling up to fetch him home. So on that morning, leaning out the window and looking down on Tooru’s small form in his alien-print pyjamas, Hajime thinks he must be crying, and calls out to him.

Tooru turns at the sound of his name and Hajime was wrong, he is not crying. He is as still and soft as the morning, his upturned face pale and radiant against the dusk-clad plane of grass scattered with petals.

“Good morning, Hajime-chan! I wanted to catch you a nice bug, but none of them are up yet”, he calls back, just loud enough for the words to float up and reach Hajime’s ear.

When Hajime leans further out the window, the morning air is cool and heavy with humidity. The sky is warming up slowly, reddish hues licking at the horizon. Tooru’s calm is unusual; he does not take failure lightly.

“You don’t sound mad about it”, Hajime ventures.

“I was”, Tooru confesses easily, and a smile crosses his face. “But then I had a really good thought and I wasn’t anymore. Wanna hear it?”

Hajime hums. He would like to go downstairs and join Tooru in the quiet garden, but there is something exciting about being told like that, across so much space, like a secret shouted out in a public place, like Hajime is the only one who can recognize it as a secret.

“You know how I used to get really scared sometimes?”, Tooru asks, voice dropping into an almost-whisper and becoming progressively more breathless as he lets his thought unfold, still only half-grasped and half-understood. “I wasn’t at all this time, and I didn’t know all these other times, but now I know it’s because with you I’m not on my own, because” (and here his voice is reverent, and while Hajime does not know that word yet, he feels the weight of the tone) “you’ll always, always be my friend.”

There is a tiny pause.

“You will, right?”

Hajime looks down at him.

‘Always’ is a concept that stretches impossibly far, right down past the grocery store to the big bridge crossing the river and into next week. And here are two of it. Hajime doesn’t like making promises he can’t keep – but then again they have seen so many next weeks together that he feels fairly confident he’ll be able to keep this one.

So he nods. “Of course.”

Tooru laughs, giggles bubbling out of him like his joy is overflowing, and he flops onto his back until he is spread out flat, gazing up at Hajime while the dampness from the ground seeps into his pyjamas and dulls their colour. He is still laughing when Hajime has tiptoed downstairs and throws himself down next to Tooru, grasping his hand. They lie like that until Hajime’s parents discover them and send them back inside scolding, and even then Tooru keeps wearing his tiny smile like something comfortable. Hajime feels warm whenever he looks at it.

That is that one. It adds a strain, and it relieves a burden; it makes them think of themselves in the categories of a definite entity, no longer existing in that timeless sphere of children’s plays where days turn into other days and weeks into other weeks unnoticed, where the absence or presence of others is felt to be as inalterable as the course of nature. It happens gradually, of course, but that one promise that fell between them in a dusky garden carves them out of that sphere and into something tangible, takes two boys and makes a them. It’s fate (Tooru’s sister says, giggling), it’s chance (Hajime’s father says, prosaic); it’s a solemn pledge (Tooru teases, much later), it’s a stupid promise (Hajime retorts hotly); but for the first time it’s something deliberate, it’s a choice.

That is that one.

The other one is the grey and drizzly afternoon when Tooru comes to Hajime’s house to watch a movie and they find out that the video recorder has broken. By that time, they know each other well enough to assume their respective roles in going about this dent in their plans – Tooru mopes and pouts and eats both of their handfuls of Apollo chocolates (wheedled out of his mother specifically for that now useless movie), while Hajime goes to do something about the situation.

It could have happened not at all. It could have happened in a number of other ways; on a sunny afternoon in the park a little down the road perhaps, some older kids playing, and Hajime and Tooru bored and challenging each other to dare and ask to participate like they challenged each other to all sorts of things these days. It could have happened much later and turned out quite different, into a casual sort of thing where they go to practice once a week just because it’s fun and never become a prodigy setter and his reliable ace. But as it is, it happens on that otherwise perfectly unremarkable, dreary afternoon. Unintentional as it was, volleyball comes into their lives at the perfect moment, when they are impressionable, bored, and, most importantly, together.

And this is how it happens: Idly channel-surfing, Hajime gets stuck on a volleyball match, intrigued by the vaguely familiar motions and commentary (his father follows the more important games, and Hajime, interested in most sports, is usually there with him). Tooru has his back turned to the TV to signal his contempt for all alternative sources of entertainment. He remains that way, stubbornly hunched between brightly coloured chocolate wrappers, while Hajime turns up the volume and scoots closer to the screen. It’s a good game, he thinks with the few categories he then has to classify that, fast-paced and with a score that remains even despite the visible effort of both teams. The audience is loud, and the excited atmosphere spills out of the TV into that dim-lit room.

Hajime stretches to pull on Tooru’s shirt. “Come on”, he urges, “you need to watch this.”

“It’s not cooler than my movie”, Tooru mutters defiantly. But he comes anyway, crawling back under the kotatsu until he is pressed tightly against Hajime’s side, and lowers his head on Hajime’s shoulder.

“Is too”, Hajime says absent-mindedly, more out of habit than out of real necessity.

“Is not”, Tooru says, and then he watches, wide-eyed, as the ball slams into the court and a scream rises from the audience.

They are out buying a volleyball with Tooru’s mother the next day after school.

Memory is too foggy a thing, blurring the boldest of jersey colours into something indeterminate and ideal. Thus neither of them remembers which teams they saw that day (although it would be a good thing to do, Tooru thinks much later, crestfallen, when he ponders possible interview answers he could give after being accepted to the national team. There he is with a decisive moment to cite, and he has no data. Then, flipping over on his bed to get back to his literature homework, he thinks, maybe it’s better that way, maybe they wouldn’t even make good idols.

And then, he thinks absently, with half a mind already returned to his reading, it doesn’t really matter, because there is only one person whom he has to thank for volleyball anyway.)

 

 

 

(**)

 

 

“We’re going to Kitagawa Daiichi”, Tooru chirps, hopping up and down, “We’re going to Kitagawa Daiichi together and we’re going to be the best players on the best team, and – Hajime, it’s going to be great, isn’t it?”

Hajime, who has been answering in the affirmative for about a hundred times in the past two days and is half-asleep in the summer heat, gives a grunt. The cooling fan does not run smoothly, filling the room with a humming that swells and subsides, swells and subsides. The floor is hot and sticky under his bare shoulders; it’s time to move to a cooler spot again.

Tooru visibly sobers and stops his hopping. The small vibrations that have reached Hajime where he’s stretched on the floor die out. “Aren’t you excited?”

“I am”, Hajime says, and then he gives in and pushes himself up to say what has been weighing on his mind for the same two days since. The sunlight filtering in from the half-open door to the garden paints a rectangle of impossible brightness on the floor. Sitting right in that spot, Tooru is a hazy shape that burns Hajime’s eyes, his shadow stretching over the tatami mats and almost reaching Hajime’s feet. Hajime squints until he can make out his face, dark against the backdrop of the light-filled room. He feels a little less grounded now that his shoulders have left the floor, almost like he’s floating, perhaps on the monotonous hum of the fan.

“Listen, we should stop with that baby habit of calling each other by our first names. We’re going to be adults real soon.”

Tooru blinks, wide-eyed. There is a pause that is a bit too long to be comfortable, and Hajime reaches the ground again. “Why?”

Of course Tooru wouldn’t just accept. It was a futile hope to entertain. Yet Hajime entertained it all the same and feels annoyed now that he does have to explain himself. He doesn’t know why the request, uttered between the two of them, sounds so childish, so irrelevant. He lets the silence extend, punctured by the labouring of the cooling fan, while he runs through possible answers in his head and dismisses them one by one with growing irritation. Tooru is watching his face with rapt attention, eyes huge and dark. Suddenly all of it is too much, the attention, the expectation, the stifling heat of the room, and the words are out of Hajime’s mouth before he can think to maybe hold them back.

“Just because! It’s ridiculous and childish and stupid!”

Outside, a cloud sidles up to the sun. The glow around Tooru disperses a little, just enough for Hajime to see the finer lines of his face and how it falls. Hajime’s stomach drops. He thinks in a flash of that one morning, cool and damp and full of greys and greens, of rushing out of the house late for school, not watching his path, and the sickening feeling of crushing a small life under his foot. It’s an irreversible step, that last one he took. It shakes all belligerence out of him.

Tooru is sitting on his hands as if to keep himself from moving, or as if to keep himself tightly tucked together.

Hajime thinks of lifting his foot, slowly, slowly, with a caution that is only born from dread and comes too late. How to give his voice a softer quality?

“It’s nothing special – everyone else will do it too.”

The silence is relentless, demanding, only made more so by the insistent droning of the fan. It’s almost as if it’s getting louder, sound emphasized by its absence.

“Just call me Iwaizumi. It’s not like it’s hard.”

He watches Tooru soundlessly pull the word off his tongue like something heavy, sticky, watches his eyes trail after it like he expects to see it hanging in the air. Watches the light catch in Tooru’s eyes, slip down his cheek and hang quivering, suspended, and fall, a tiny streak, and disappear, extinguished. Something in his face shifts inward (more tears spill), tenses to contain a growing flood. And breaks.

“I’m not going to!”, Tooru yells, “I’m not!”

It’s quiet.

The fan has given up.

A gentle breeze is trickling in from the door to the garden left fully open in the wake of Tooru’s storm, moving the stagnant air and cooling Hajime’s face. He feels heavy now, feels his weight pressing his knees and shins and his feet into the floor with every breath.

It’s the weight of growing up, perhaps. The weight of those new undercurrents they both feel running through their conversations, their fights, their silences; something ominous that defies closer investigation. It belongs to the world outside their sheltered childhood universe, full of rules and values that are foreign, unnecessary to them. Whenever that world intrudes on them, Tooru reacts with violent resistance, almost like they need protecting. From what, Hajime can only guess. Do you think, he wants to ask Tooru, that we cannot stand our ground?

He has not found the words for that yet, but already then he knows that he must not leave Tooru alone. He shoves his anger aside, pushes it into the thin line of his mouth, firmly set, into the crease of his brows, into his hands clenched into fists, gets up and follows.

When he emerges into the thick summer air, there is nothing under his feet but grass, warmed by the sun. After all, with him and Tooru there is always a choice.

Tooru is sitting with his back pressed against the slender cherry tree just at the edge of the garden, coiled tight. Hajime crouches down in front of him and peels his shaking hands away from his face.

“Don’t leave me”, he makes out, between sobs and Tooru’s eyes, wild and pleading.

“I’m not going to leave you, dummy”, Hajime says, “how often do I have to promise that?”, and then Tooru falls forward and grips his shirt and clings. Damp spots are forming on the fabric where it is balled up in Tooru’s fists and, stretching over Hajime’s shoulder, cradling his forehead. Tooru’s curls are sweaty too, plastered to his neck. Hajime brings up a hand to brush them away and gets a sniffle in return. They’re gross and sweaty already anyway, so he just lets his hand linger there until Tooru’s breathing gets a little more regular.

“That doesn’t mean I’m gonna budge though”, he says sternly when Tooru has wiped his face and blown his nose. “I don’t want to go around being called by my given name like a toddler.”

Tooru’s red-rimmed gaze stays firmly locked with Hajime’s. On his face blooms an angelic smile that screams trouble.

“Fine. But… I’m not going to call you Iwaizumi. That’s way too cumbersome. I can’t call out so many syllables when I’m going to toss to you on the court, right… Iwa-chan?”

Hajime doesn’t flinch, although it takes some effort. Instead, he tries to stare Tooru down. “You’re just doing that to make me regret it. Not going to happen. It’s just going to make _you_ look ridiculous.”

Tooru’s smile deepens. “We’ll see, Iwa-chan.”

Hajime grins, too. “We’ll see. Oikawa.”

It feels weird, but not as weird as Hajime had expected. After all, they make the rules. Tooru – Oikawa – will understand that too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spot the wrong season in this one! (I'm sorry.)


	2. Three Confessions: The First

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How something can be so profound and yet so little, he thinks, passing through the outskirts of their neighbourhood, how a boy can be a boy, then wake up at night and smile, wake up in the morning and be someone with a secret.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Early chapter 2 thanks to the long weekend!

 

On a Friday a few weeks before the first training camp of their third year at Kitagawa Daiichi, their first as captain and vice-captain, Oikawa decides that they need to spend their night watching video footage of their opponents’ games to start preparing plays and game plans. He offers this thought to Hajime when he steps out of the showers after evening practice, his voice muffled under movement and fabric while he’s towelling his hair.

“You are suggesting a sleepover”, Hayashi, one of their fellow third-years, observes drily from where he is stuffing his uniform into his sports bag. There is hooting and grinning from most of the others.

Oikawa removes the towel from his face and returns the grins unashamedly. “How sharp you are, Hayashi-kun. I am suggesting a session of intense strategizing followed by, yes, a sleepover. Coincidentally, Iwa-chan’s bed is very comfortable.”

From the gaggle of first-years in the corner comes a choked sound. Probably Kindaichi.

“Hell no”, Hajime says, “we’re not sleeping in the same bed!”

Oikawa gives him his most betrayed expression. “You’re really going to make your magnificent setter and captain sleep on the cold, hard floor to ruin his back? Harsh.”

“You’re clingy, and you drool in your sleep. It’s not happening.”

From the first-years comes muffled snickering. Probably Kunimi. Oikawa gives an affronted gasp and draws himself up to formulate an appropriately wounded response. Thankfully, Hajime manages to cut it short by balling up Oikawa’s shirt and throwing it in his face.

“Shut up and get dressed”, he instructs. “If I have to spend all night listening to you whine about Ushijima, I want to get some homework done before.”

 

 

 

They spend that night in front of Hajime’s laptop, shoulders bumping, Hajime hitting pause and replay and pause and replay while Oikawa complains about his bed being too soft to take notes on and pushes holes in his paper, blotching ink over Hajime’s blankets. Outside, swirling clouds obscure the moon. The night is warm enough to leave the window open, so they talk in hushed tones, heads bent close to hear the tinny shouts and catch the intricate flow of events on screen. Oikawa’s usually sweeping gestures are kept small to fit their limited space and there is ink on his chin where he rests his pen when his eyes are glued to the tiny black figures dashing about on the court. Hajime almost reaches out to wipe it off, but checks the movement – too comfortable their bubble of companionship to burst it by reminding Oikawa of his vanity.

 

 

 

The night clears up and steers into a few inky, soft hours with solemn shadows climbing the walls of Hajime’s room, following the course of the moon. The laptop screen is black, only a green light blinking occasionally to signal that the device has gone into power saving mode. There are notes spread on the bed, scrawled and elaborate, several of them crinkled where elbows have been set on them or hands have swiped them away impatiently to get at a fresh sheet of paper. The small lamp by the bed is still on, throwing a pool of light just big enough to illuminate the laptop and the space of their heads. Tooru is suddenly awake in the stillness, motionless and taking in what surroundings he can without turning his head.

Hajime is on his stomach next to him, head cushioned on his arms, looking like he fell asleep propped up on his elbows scribbling down play suggestions. It’s hard to see in the half-dark of the room, but possibly there is the black shape of his pen peeking out under his chin. Tooru draws a small, startled breath at the warmth that surges through him, tugs at the corners of his mouth and constricts his chest. Then it’s over, the moment of epiphany leaving him not utterly altered, but half-conscious, calm and sure, like a sleeper who, half-woken to find himself in the comfort of home, slips back into sleep seamlessly, feeling safe. Only in the morning it will push itself to the forefront of his thoughts, claiming its place of prime importance, a kaleidoscope shaken so that different light falls onto all things Tooru knows.

For now, his mind and body are heavy and content. Hajime is a quiet sleeper most of the time, his breathing almost inaudible and so deep that it wraps Tooru in calm. Tooru cannot tell who of them fell asleep first. He allows a small warmth to bloom in his chest at the thought that maybe Hajime decided to let him stay while the screen saver took over and his pen drooped in his hand. He reaches out carefully and turns off the light, casting the room into cooler colours, and then, keeping his movements fluid as if asleep, he turns and moulds his body alongside Hajime’s, head pillowed on his shoulder and one arm stealing across his back. Cradled by the rhythm of Hajime’s breathing, Tooru is asleep again.

Through the blinds left open, moonlight climbs over the empty futon set up on the floor next to the bed.

 

 

 

 

Tooru is an early riser, and this time of the year is his favourite. He likes the softness of the early morning; the mellow spring air, the still careful light. He likes being up first, likes his running steps to pass a stationary world with gates closed and blinds shut, him alone in motion, up ahead. There is a strangely silent companionship with those who greet him on his morning run, always the same once he leaves behind the crisscrossing silvery evidence of the garden snails’ busy nights – the middle-aged man in the tracksuit walking his spotted dog who bounds after Tooru for a few strides, and old Sasaki-san from the fruit shop, who always throws him an apple or a nashi when he is on his way back. He lets his thoughts run free on the familiar route and often only wakes up properly when he is back home and in the shower.

Today might seem hardly different. The sky is pastel-coloured outside the window, small brushstrokes of peach and lavender on the blue. The trees rustle pleasantly, and there is the sound of a lonely car rushing by, like a deep, content exhale. Tooru is awake, eyes opened on the pale blue-grey fingers that steal in from the window. But even in listening to that drawn-out, steady sound he notices the warm presence at his back and suddenly, suddenly he can’t breathe, because today the light is different, he is not sure whether a world has already collapsed or is still crumbling, there is Hajime’s arm over his waist and Tooru needs to get out of here, right now.

He lets himself into his parents’ house as quietly as possible while his keys shake in his fingers, skips half the steps on his way up the stairs and throws himself into his running shoes and out onto the street again. Oddly enough, breathing grows easier as soon as his lungs burn with every step, and by the time he nods politely to the man in the tracksuit and bends down to pet the spotted dog’s head between strides, he feels like he can let his fists uncurl and think without his stomach turning over. 

How something can be so profound and yet so little, he thinks, passing through the outskirts of their neighbourhood, how a boy can be a boy, then wake up at night and smile, wake up in the morning and be someone with a secret. He’s sprinting, he realizes, his feet pounding on the street and his breath coming in ragged gasps. He wills himself to slow. Once he reaches the open fields and turns his back on the sunrise, he is calm enough to be coherent and latches onto the thought that a game plan must be formed; and when he turns the corner of Sasaki-san’s fruit shop half an hour later to catch the red-cheeked apple and her smile, he can throw her a tired but honest one of himself in return.

_It’s a match, Tooru; you always are okay in those._

That thought takes him through the day, through Hajime’s questioning looks and too many too-stretchy smiles, too many everyday actions thought through and overthought. But when he collapses onto his bed after practice (too many near-missed tosses, the sound of Hajime’s palm against the ball still filling his head), he feels worn thin, because after all, in matches he is only ever okay with Hajime by his side.

Tooru cries, then, and then some more when he finds out that calming down is much harder without Hajime berating him on the phone, cries until he feels boneless and empty and dry. Lying on his back with his eyes trained onto the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling and his breath still hitching, he thinks that maybe he doesn’t need a new analogy. Maybe he just needs to practise.

So he practises, practises talk and touch and laughter and banter, practises volleyball and homework, walks to school and carefully averted eyes in the changing room. On the bus ride to training camp, he stares out of the window with a slow sense of foreboding (he is not going to make it, isn’t he?, already thinking of silent corners and small, empty spaces to curl up in).

And he nearly does not make it, were it not for first-year genius Kageyama Tobio, who snaps Tooru out of his wallowing with all the air-crackling promise of an impending storm. Later, Tooru’s apprehension towards Kageyama will turn into something much stronger, much more childish and insecure. But he will never forget that Kageyama’s tidal pull did, perhaps, save him back in that week when Tooru was so caught up in his drama, when his resolve was so near breaking point that he might have gone and ruined it all – and for that, too, he will look at Kageyama with unease.

But first, two days after Tooru started carrying that secret, he accepts a confession.

 

 

 

By the beginning of his third year of middle school, Oikawa Tooru has received and rejected a handful of confessions. The number is by no means enormous, but such that he is, while not necessarily comfortable, certainly smooth and gentle enough in his rejections that most girls leave him not utterly devastated. Rejecting confessions is at this point almost an ingrained procedure, which is why, on that overcast morning behind the gym, Tooru surprises himself by accepting one.

They stare at each other for a second, Tooru and the girl. Tooru’s mind is utterly quiet, empty.

“Oikawa-san…” She starts slowly, trails off, and starts again. “Really?”

_Really, Tooru?_

With faint terror, it occurs to him that he doesn’t remember her name. He looks down at the confession letter he’s holding, at her name at the bottom of the page. Kawasaki Akiko. Her handwriting is less than textbook perfect, the lines a little crooked. Somehow, that small observation warms him to her. Grounds him again.

Accepting doesn’t go as smooth as rejecting would have gone, but he manages.

He is the last one to enter the changing room, clutching the letter and the small bag of chocolates Kawasaki has given him. Most of his teammates immediately zero in on that.

“Aw, another rejection!”, Hayashi exclaims theatrically. “Why do you always get food despite rejecting them? Will you share with us?”

“I actually didn’t reject her this time”, Tooru says, firmly avoiding Hajime’s eyes. Instead of willing his voice to stay even, he lets it slip into singsong. “But I’ll still share with you, because I am this nice.”

There is a general clamour of congratulations and inappropriate suggestions and thumps on Tooru’s back, but once Hayashi and a couple of others are happily digging into the chocolates (they really are good), there is no reason for him to keep watching them eat. He trudges over to his locker and fiddles with the zipper of his gym bag. Eventually he is so fed up with his own pathetic attempts at stalling that he looks up right into Hajime’s disbelieving stare.

“She’s nice”, Tooru shrugs, aiming for airiness, “she cooks well and her handwriting is pretty, and she wore this cute little bow in her hair.”

“Wow”, Hajime says, “what are you from, the fifties?”

Tooru shrugs again. He can come up with better arguments during the date they scheduled for Saturday. Surely, a couple of hours spent with Kawasaki will yield information on some characteristics or manners that make good reasons for dating her. Until then, he really needs to explain all of this to himself.

“I guess I shouldn’t expect congratulations from Iwa-chan”, he sighs instead, “he’s always so jealous when I come first in something.” 

He expertly ducks the blow, proud that his smile feels almost normal.

 

 

 

By Saturday morning, he is sure that accepting Kawasaki’s confession was an excellent idea. For one thing, getting a girlfriend is possibly the most elegant diversionary tactic he could have come up with, and Tooru prides himself on that elegance. No one will suspect anything – most importantly, _Hajime_ will never suspect anything – even if Tooru is actually hopeless. (They all vividly remember Maeda-kun from their class walking into a chair because he was watching the way Abe-chan’s ponytail moved as she talked to a friend. Tooru is quite sure that he will never do something that ridiculous – but just in case, thinking of a girlfriend would always make for a convenient excuse for such cases, too.) 

And then there is that peripheral feeling, hardly daring enough to be called a tentative hope: that maybe, getting to know her, he will come to genuinely like her, and all of this will end.

By Saturday afternoon, Kawasaki is shyly stealing glances over her menu while Tooru pretends to peruse his. The words swirl somewhere at the lower edge of his vision. He has felt hollow waiting for her in front of the supermarket where they had agreed to meet. Has felt like he was using her for distraction, until what happened turned out to be the opposite. He blinks and in that liminal moment of half-lowered lashes, his mind blurs Kawasaki’s slender shoulders into Hajime’s broader form. Kawasaki’s hand on the table, toying with the edge of the menu, steadies into Hajime’s, calloused like Tooru’s and with the faint scar stretching over the knuckle of his second finger from where he cut himself on a piece of wire when they were seven.

Tooru shakes his head and falls back into himself. Conversation eludes him. He is not accustomed to finding small talk difficult. With any luck Kawasaki will pin it down as nervousness and find it endearing, but it does nothing to clear Tooru’s mind. A waitress approaches them, and Kawasaki orders something sweet that Hajime would sigh at. Tooru, who still hasn’t read the menu, follows suit.

The waitress retreats. Kawasaki’s gaze flits towards Tooru’s face, drops to her hands on the table. They still, like she’s repressing nervousness of her own. She’s wearing a blouse with a separate collar, nicely pinned. Tooru sees her in front of a mirror, painstakingly adjusting it, the white of her throat rising from it like a column.

He murmurs a compliment, finds it chunky, but her shoulders hunch and her head dips between them, cheeks colouring. She’s cute responding to compliments, all embarrassment and shy delight. But his thoughts are on Hajime in a dress shirt, on the small secret space between skin and collar. The tilt of his head towards Tooru even when his eyes are following movement elsewhere, his shoulders angled to shield them from the room. The frayed edge of the menu that Hajime’s fingers would smooth out.

Kawasaki’s foot brushes his under the table. They both flinch. Her blush reaches the tips of her ears that peek out from under her hair. Tooru feels heat on his own face as he thinks of a myriad of innocent touches, shoulders brushing, a flick on the forehead, fingers touching when they hand each other things, the soft weight of a borrowed jumper.

Someone shatters a cup.

“Excuse me”, Tooru says to Kawasaki. The scrape of his chair on the floor is drowned in the noise from two tables over, apologies repeated and another waitress kneeling to mop up the spill. The silence of the tiled bathroom walls closes over him like a sanctuary.

 

 

 

He remembers that now, in another bathroom with no tiles on the wall, with a low ceiling and the smell of cheap soap over the fainter one of gym. He hasn’t let himself stop to examine his feelings, never listening longer than to determine that they are not wanted, cannot be. They are a jumble. Sharp denial, white-hot anger, bone-clenching fear, and the softer tones he’s all the more eager to push away, a pull in his chest, something akin to melancholy settling like a blanket around him. Tooru hates them. Hates how they make him feel like giving up, when giving up is never an option. By all rights there should be more tiles on these walls. Why else does it feel like his heartbeat echoes around him?

“Hey Oikawa. You’re spacing out.”

Tooru flinches and Hajime’s hand drops away. His gaze doesn’t, though, stays on Tooru’s face, questioning, steady, steady, and Tooru feels hot irrational anger rise. He turns away abruptly.

“What are you worried about, idiot? You’re all tense.”

He laughs a little, aiming for unconcerned, but it comes back off the walls in shards, and Hajime knows. There is a sharp unhappy twist to his mouth. He doesn’t press, and Tooru hates his patience. He wants to be pushed and pushed until he has an excuse for spilling, wants it _out_. Gone. Removed. He wants Hajime’s eyes off him, that worried gaze trailing him around the court. He wants to watch his mother bouncing Takeru on her knee, watch her happy face without that leaden guilt dropping into his stomach, anchoring him in place unable to look away. He wants to lean into the solid weight of Hajime’s body and be accepted there. He wants a place without thought, dark and silent as the space between two stars.

And Tooru is so, so grateful for the existence of Kageyama Tobio that he almost smiles at the boy when they later re-enter the room they sleep in, Tooru nursing a fresh bruise for “acting like a jealous fucking toddler over a kid who adores you, dumbass”. Almost. Kageyama hurriedly ducks his head at what is probably a terrifying grimace playing out on Tooru’s face.

He dives into this willingly, confesses to himself until there is no other thing to say, he’s afraid of Kageyama, terrified. He is obsessed with beating him, until it’s Kageyama’s face he sees at night, until his dreams are volleyball and crumbling on the court before twin shadows towering behind the net. The mind is a powerful tool.

 

 

 

After all the noise and activity of training camp, the bus ride home is pleasantly quiet. They’re taking the coast road, the sea a calm, blazing plane outside the windows, every potential colour of its own swallowed by the sunlight reflected off it. Most of the others are asleep, wrapped in their jerseys and looking peaceful. There is whispering from the back row, but it’s low, sleepy with intermittent silences, and it only serves to heighten Hajime’s focus.

The subject of that focus is sitting to his left, leaning against the window and pretending to be asleep. Oikawa’s breathing is deep and even, his mouth slack. But his eyelids flutter whenever the bus hits a bump on the road, the tiniest movement of discomfort. For a second, Hajime imagines him actually asleep, knows he’d be folding his own jersey to pillow Oikawa’s head against the window, can almost see his eyes open for a moment, unfocused, and that small smile half unfolding before he’s out again. But Oikawa is keeping his head too steady against the glass, and every flutter of his lashes makes Hajime’s blood pulse.

With practice and team bonding activities carrying on during the nights until they were all too exhausted to play, or talk, or think, Hajime has barely had the time to ponder over Oikawa’s pretences, minuscule and grand-scale ones alike. But now, in the quiet bus, with every calm exhale from his left another small deception, he feels his anger rising, hot and insistent.

When they clamber out of the bus, stretching and muttering and collecting bags, Oikawa rubs his eyes and keeps his movements slow. He’s so ridiculously careful it makes Hajime’s stomach churn. He busies himself with cleaning up and debriefing with the coach while Oikawa chats with the slower ones among their teammates and takes care that no luggage is left on the bus and all sweets wrappers and water bottles are being properly disposed of. It takes forever until the first-years leave, too, all earnest bows and awkwardly muttered words of thanks; and even so Hajime buries his hands and his questions in his pockets and lets his feet steer him home in silence, still debating whether to address the issue or let it lie.

But Oikawa speaks up like he can barely bear the quiet anymore – Hajime knows this because the lightness of his teasing tone is forced. “Iwa-chan, what’s up with you? I could feel your menacing stare on me all the way home. It makes for really bad sleep, you know.”

Hajime is in no mood to indulge him. “What’s up with me? What’s up with _you_? You’ve been fucking weird all week and frankly I’m fed up wi—“

“Iwa-chan”, Oikawa interrupts, raising his hands in a placating gesture, but unfazed by Hajime’s outburst and laughing his stupid tinkling laugh. “You need to stop hovering around behaving like you’re my mom. People comment on it. And I keep telling you, I’m fine.”

All of a sudden, Hajime feels bone-weary. _You wouldn’t even sleep on me on the way home, idiot_ , he thinks. _Usually nothing I do can make you sit up straight_. But it’s not like he can say that out loud, so he opts for a glare and a shrug.

“Whatever. If you insist on being difficult and overly dramatic, be my guest.”

It’s easy to slip into that old pattern. Always the easy way out. Out of the corners of his eyes, he watches Oikawa practically hightail it down that well-trodden road. Maybe Hajime should just let it go.

“I’m never difficult and overly dramatic”, Oikawa gasps, dramatically.

“Yeah, sure”, Hajime says.

“I’ve been trying to be a good captain. That entails treating everyone on the team equally instead of hanging with Iwa-chan all the time. No need to be jealous though”, that last part he practically croons, “you’re still my one and only love, after all.”

Hajime hits him.

Oikawa screeches. “Ow, Iwa-chan, that’s going to leave a bruise! I open up about my heartfelt feelings and you hurt me – that’s why no one wants to go out with you, right there. You will end up old and alone, with no one but generous Oikawa-san to take care of you.”

“Now _that’s_ a terrifying prospect.”

“Iwa-chan!”

This sort of banter is so familiar that Hajime hardly needs to pay attention. He can look at the street instead, at the fine cracks in the pavement that run on and ramify, weeds growing from them in places. Maybe he should let it go. Maybe he is being a little paranoid; but the more Oikawa tries to reassure him, the more suspicious he gets. Small things come to mind, little nuisances that have been conspicuously absent over the past days. Oikawa has not once tried to steal Hajime’s water bottle, his food or one of his shirts, has refrained from flopping over Hajime’s lap complaining about how tired he is, has not poked Hajime’s face when he finds him too grumpy, and has in general been distant and very careful not to tou—

Hajime jumps as Oikawa latches onto his arm, veering them to the right and into the small convenience store two streets from their own. The store is small and worn-looking, stacks of newspapers and magazines next to the register filling the air with the smell of paper and ink, dry and a little stuffy. It used to be the outer border of their childhood universe – an exciting place a daytrip away, where pocket money could be exchanged for bright-red popsicles and small games. The shelves ceiling-high, an onslaught of colours, and the owners always up for listening to an account of their newest adventures. The shelves are still the same, though the ceiling is significantly lower than in Hajime’s memories. Both he and Oikawa can probably navigate the store blind. The owners have aged, though, and nowadays various high-school students man the register during the afternoons. Oikawa is friendly with all of them, despite being at least two years their junior. This is certainly the only reason why Hajime doesn’t yank his arm from Oikawa’s hold as they sweep by the register.

“I want a snack and you’re buying”, Oikawa declares, already pulling him towards an aisle.

“What? Why?!”

“Because you said mean things about me, hit me, and are not paying attention to what I tell you.” Oikawa actually ticks his accusations off his fingers, dropping his hands only to grab some milk bread and then pull on Hajime again, now steering him towards the checkout.

“Hello, Yoshi-chan, Iwa-chan is paying for me today!”

Yoshiko laughs, used to his antics, and shoots Hajime a questioning glance. He raises his eyebrows at Oikawa, who tries puppy eyes in response. It really shouldn’t look cute. Hajime sighs.

“Fine, I’ll buy myself some peace and quiet.”

“I didn’t hear that”, Oikawa sings, clutching his milk bread.

He keeps close to Hajime for the rest of their walk home, looking relaxed and content. Hajime’s breath leaves him a little easier with each occasional bump of their shoulders, and when Oikawa has cheerfully waved goodbye and disappeared inside his parents’ house, he walks the short distance to his own home with no thoughts but those of dinner and the velvety quality of the air that promises summer. Such a mild evening, he thinks.

 

 

 

 

But when summer comes this year, with heat and sweat and tears, it’s to be the worst one of Hajime’s life so far.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is this a cliffhanger when we all know what's coming?


	3. Three Confessions: The Second

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _You (19:13): Oikawa what the fuck_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here it comes

 

_[08. May]_

_You (18:34): your mother just called my house to tell you dinner’s ready_

_You (18:34): where the fuck are you_

_You (18:35): I’m not your secretary. Also, she worries_

_[15. May]_

_You (17:46): I’m gonna swing by the store for my mum, wanna come?_

_You (17:52): check your phone, I don’t have all day_

_You (17:57): fine, I’ll just knock_

_You (18:05): I don’t even have to ask where you are. I’m going shopping for your mum too now. If you read this, clean up and get your ass home_

_[02. June]_

_(outgoing call to [Oikawa Tooru] 19:11)_

_You (19:13): Oikawa what the fuck_

_You (19:14): did you seriously sneak back_

_You (19:15): this is ridiculous_

_You (19:19): we have that chemistry project due tomorrow, don’t forget. And stretch properly_

_[21. June]_

_You (19:28): Shittykawa, answer your phone_

_You (19:29): Coach texted me that he sent you details about a practice match next month. You’re supposed to get back to him till tomorrow_

_You (19:29): I’m not your babysitter, asshole. Stop ignoring calls because you’re ~busy~_

_You (20:47): I hope for your sake that you’re asleep_

_(outgoing call to [Oikawa Tooru] 21:12)_

_(outgoing call to [Oikawa Tooru] 21:24)_

 

 

 

“Hey”, Hajime says. Oikawa whips around with a startled sound just as the ball lands on the other side of the court, a hand’s breadth out of bounds. He turns back to check on it and finds it rolling, slowing among the dozen or so others strewn about the gym floor.

“Was that in?”

“I didn’t see”, Hajime lies.

Oikawa narrows his eyes. His hair is plastered to his forehead with sweat; his loose shirt is sticking to his back and chest in strange folds that move sluggishly when he crosses his arms. Hajime feels sweat coating his own skin, too – the night air is thick, draped heavily over streetlamps and telephone poles, shushing the trees: all the leaves stilled under its weight.

“We need to talk.”

“About what, Iwa-chan?” Oikawa is using his lightest, most carefree tone, already moving to pick up another ball.

“This.” Hajime’s gesture encompasses their surroundings, the windows tinted dark, the floor shining with sweat and the reflections of the ceiling lights, the shadows in the corners, the shadows under Oikawa’s eyes. “You need to slow down. You were limping again after practice yesterday, and you’re taking painkillers. Don’t even _try_ to deny it. Where do you think this is going to end, you fucking moron? Are you trying to ruin yourself _on_ _purpose_?”

Oikawa lifts his chin and stares back defiantly.

“I need to get better.”

“Yeah”, Hajime says in what he hopes is a reasonable tone of voice, “but you obviously can’t go on like this.”

Oikawa’s face shifts, closing off. His hands spin the ball, spin it, spin it. His eyes never leave Hajime’s face, and Hajime looks steadily back. Under that sharp, calculating expression, no gears are turning; Oikawa has already made up his mind.

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do, Iwa-chan”, he says, low, cold. “Not you.”

“I didn’t say anything of that sort and you know it”, Hajime sighs.

“Then stop trying to hold me back!”

The words explode into the space between them; then, frayed out by the metal cages covering the long tracks of light that run across the ceiling, rain back down. How readily Oikawa misunderstands him. How easily he accepts a reality in which Hajime would be willing to do such a thing. Hajime doesn’t bother to contradict him.

“Fine”, he snarls, “run yourself ragged and don’t fucking tell me anything. I’m going to leave. Lock the club room when you go.”

He spins on his heel and makes for the door, too furious to wait for a response. When he turns to close the door, Oikawa is already mid-jump again, eyes on nothing but the ball.

 

 

 

 

_(You (22:42): and get back to coach)_

_((read 22:44))_

Oikawa waits for him the next morning, sitting slumped on the low wall that runs toward the narrow flight of steps at the end of their street, deep in the shadow of the wisteria tree that leans out over the alleyway. He only looks up when Hajime slows to a stop in front of him.

“Remember when we were six and you found that bird’s egg under the hedge?”

“You dropped it.”

“Yeah”, Oikawa sighs. “And you just… turned and left. That’s how I knew you were really, really mad.”

Hajime hums non-committally.

Oikawa sighs again. “You still are, huh? It’s kind of scary when you don’t yell at me or hit me, though. Can you not be mad anymore?”, he asks, hopeful.

“Will you stop being an idiot?”, Hajime asks in return.

On that, Oikawa really looks at him for the first time that morning; an open, steady gaze, not the flighty glances he stole before in between watching his hands. It’s a look that tells of his answer before it is voiced – a little annoyed, a little challenging, and there, in the quirk of his mouth, a little self-ironic. It’s a look Hajime can accept, he thinks. At least it’s honest. At least it means that _something_ has changed.

“Probably not”, Oikawa says, sounding almost apologetic.

“What kind of shitty apology is that?”, Hajime grouses. But he extends a hand to haul Oikawa off the wall regardless. Oikawa’s shirt is pleasantly cool under his fingers, his arm a solid, reassuring weight. He keeps his hand there as he manoeuvers him on and up the stairs. “Come on, we’re gonna be late.”

And Oikawa lets himself be dragged along, happily.

 

 

 

 

In the middle of their third year at Kitagawa Daiichi, Oikawa busts his knee. Before that, Hajime has watched him drive himself into this, and has not done enough to stop it. Has not done anything, perhaps, after that stifling June night that saw them yelling at each other over the expanse of the court. That’s what he thinks, sitting on the gym floor on a Sunday afternoon, in the midst of the warm patch of sunlight where Oikawa has collapsed, hands clutching his shoulders and, for the first time in years, at a loss about what to do in order to calm him down.

He resolves here and then that keeping quiet will never again be an option.

Oikawa has only said one thing since they have determined that he can’t put weight on his leg. He has looked at his knee, pale and only slightly swollen, has dragged his gaze up to where Hajime was crouched next to him and, with visible effort, has wrenched out a single sentence. “Hajime. I’m so scared.”

Since then, he has been crying, from the pain and the fear of what this useless knee might mean. Face contorted and eyes shut tight, he doesn’t hear a single thing Hajime says to him, just keeps his hands clenched around Hajime’s arms and shakes. Hajime himself doesn’t hear what he is saying anymore, he just keeps talking, keeps up a flow of words that he hopes will calm Oikawa. He’s probably talking to him about childhood things they’ve done, by now.

And then he thinks of something that might do.

“Tooru”, he says and Oikawa draws a shuddering breath, so Hajime says it again, “Tooru”, makes it a singsong, a litany, “Tooru, Tooru, Tooru”, until Oikawa sways forward, leans his forehead against Hajime’s shoulder and lets himself be held. They sit motionless in that patch of sunlight, waiting for the ambulance.

 

 

 

 

It takes weeks for Oikawa’s injury to heal; weeks that see small actions like tying shoelaces or taking a flight of stairs stretch out impossibly, stubbornly seizing chunks of his mornings and afternoons. Weeks spent sitting on the bench during practice (he doesn’t skip once after he is allowed out of bed), watching the team and sharing whispers with the coach. It’s like the injury has snapped him out of whatever he had gotten himself into: he’s all sharp eyes and smiles of encouragement, and when their coach asks him to talk Kageyama through his jump serve, Oikawa complies with no more than a tightening of his shoulders that probably only Hajime notices.

Because this is what Hajime does these days, he thinks with some sort of vengeful sullenness that is entirely unfamiliar. Noticing things from a distance.

Oikawa’s emotions have never been particularly stable, but now he’s downright flailing. On the first day after the injury he’s holding Hajime’s hand like he did back in elementary school, on the way to school when Hajime is keeping him company in the car because Oikawa would walk if Hajime did. The next day, Hajime is late to class because he’s been waiting for Oikawa’s car to pick him up only to find out he’d already gone. Under the hard gaze of their history teacher, Oikawa lifts one shoulder in a gesture of apology.

“I thought you’d enjoy the walk more in this fine weather, Iwa-chan”, he says lightly when Hajime approaches his desk after the lesson. The haste with which the statement is made betrays its tone, but again it’s so obviously something Oikawa doesn’t want to talk about that Hajime lets it slide.

“Tell me next time, will you?”, he asks mildly instead. Oikawa nods mutely, looking at the floor.

It continues on from there, a pattern of absences, of missing touches and silent phones. Oikawa is usually almost omnipresent when he is sick, elbowing himself into Hajime’s school hours via text with a running commentary on whatever documentary he’s watching or sending him photographs of his soup titled _(_ _๑_ _-_ _﹏_ _-_ _๑_ _) I bet iwa-chan’s bland taste buds would really enjoy this_. Now he’s quiet and withdrawn, oozing a false selflessness that makes Hajime’s skin crawl. 

He puts it down to the unusual situation and the strain Oikawa must be under until he realizes one night that it is part of something much larger, part of an Oikawa who goes to turn on the lights in a gym at night alone, an Oikawa who steps forward without reaching for Hajime’s sleeve to pull him along. Is it a testimony of trust or of conceit, Hajime wonders much later, that it never occurred to him that this could be anything but a sign of distress? It doesn’t, so he lets a morning come that smells like new beginnings, watches early light fall on paving stones and paint a replica of the banister in blues and rose under Oikawa’s careful feet as they scale the steps at the end of their street, lets them retrace their steps over darker hues of orange later, the shadow falling down and away from them, and carries both of their bags and an ice pack up the narrower set of stairs into Oikawa’s room.

He only asks when Oikawa is securely settled with his knee propped up and the crutches leaning against the wall just out of reach. He keeps his voice gentle and unassuming, but he might have shouted for how Oikawa startles and drops his pen onto the homework sheet on the desk. When he looks up, his eyes are wide, apparently guileless, but Hajime can see the thoughts racing behind.

He squints. “Don’t you dare give me the ‘nothing is wrong, Iwa-chan’ thing you’ve been trying to pull all the time. Do you think I’m stupid? I can see something’s going on. And”, he raises his voice to talk over Oikawa who tries to butt in that yes, very obviously something is wrong and it’s his stupid, stupid knee, “I don’t think it’s your knee.”

Oikawa’s mouth snaps shut. For the smallest moment, he looks absolutely panicked. It’s quickly replaced by something bland, but it makes Hajime relent nonetheless.

“Look”, he continues, softening, “it’s fine if you don’t want to tell me. I can’t make you, obviously. But just… you don’t have to do everything on your own.”

“Iwa-chan”, Oikawa whispers. It’s a small sound that barely makes it over his lips. His eyes are soft and unfocused, making him look much younger, much more reminiscent of a boy who had sat quietly on a guest futon at night, curled into himself and not moving for hours if Hajime did not wake by chance and crawled out of bed to wrap him in his blanket and whisper nonsense stories until he fell asleep. It’s a lost look, out of place on a face usually so alive.

“You might not want to hear this”, Oikawa continues, still whisper-thin. It makes Hajime want to hug him like when they were kids, but they’re older now, and Oikawa has been so prickly about touch lately that Hajime usually waits for him to initiate anything. So he goes for the next best thing he can think of. Normalcy.

“I don’t want to hear most of the things you say. That’s never stopped you before.”

He is rewarded with Oikawa’s eyes snapping into focus and a small, self-deprecating chuckle. “That’s right. I never let anything stop me, don’t I, Iwa-chan? Not usually.”

Hajime looks at him silently, willing him to go on. Oikawa sighs a little and wriggles, pushing his knee up on the pillow. He’s looking away from Hajime, expression turned inward like he’s debating with himself. Then, suddenly, on an exhale he’s there, words hesitant but tumbling.

“I wanted—I tried to be my own person, but… it’s like I’m no good when you… when you’re not with me. Look at what I’ve done these past months, this whole… thing”, he jerks a hand towards his knee without turning his head, keeping his gaze on Hajime’s face, eyes burning a question. Hajime wants to speak up, wants to deny him, but Oikawa fiercely gestures for him to stay silent, as if, now that he has started speaking, he can’t stop.

“And I’m terrified, because… these things aren’t... it used to be such an easy concept, we’ll be together always, but you know we really won’t. We’ll move out and move away and m-marry… and I don’t _want_ this to end, but it’s just how things go, confluence and divergence, and I… keep wondering. What if we’re just together by… by force of habit?”

Hajime follows this jumbled narrative with difficulty, but he has caught the main message quickly enough, and it makes a vein pulse in his forehead. If he has to listen to one more ‘course of nature’ metaphor, he’s going to scream. _Oh, brought together so early_ , they croon with the voices of elderly aunts and enamoured neighbours, _and then they grew up together, so of course – so naturally – so inevitably – they happened, they evolved into this, it’s just the natural flow of things_. It makes him sick. Brought together they were, he thinks, if only because they met at an age where neither of them could crawl; but as soon as they could move of their own accord, they were damn well free to move away from each other, only they never did.

And if Oikawa, who keeps himself bottled so tightly these days, still thinks of them in these terms... If he still thinks that one day they’ll just end, like things do, grow apart, diverge, dry out, it’s no wonder he’s scared.

“Do you seriously think that?”, Hajime interrupts, anger seeping into his voice. “That we’re here because it just went this way? That’s bullshit. All of that is bullshit. We’re not here because our mothers set up play dates for us and we went along from there like it was something _necessary_. We’re here because we _decided_ to be. Because we can walk away from this every day, and we choose not to. Do you think I’d have stuck with your sorry ass for years just for the sake of nostalgia or tradition or whatever shit?

“We’re not _passive_. This is _us_ , Oikawa, and whatever we do we do because we decide to. So don’t go around accepting whatever happens because it’s ‘bound to happen’ or ‘meant to be’ or something stupid like that. You can change things, and you can work on this. We’re not a fucking nature metaphor. I’m here because I want to be, and I better believe that you are, too.”

He can see the revelation play out on Oikawa’s features, clear for a moment and then clouded, choked, as it overwhelms him and he falls back on defence to stand his ground. Hajime takes it without resistance, knowing it for the self-protection it is, with no real malice behind.

“I didn’t think you had it in you to be that smart, Iwa-chan.”

“Well, and I thought you’d be much smarter than this. Turns out we were both wrong.”

Oikawa laughs, a single shaky syllable, and falls silent again.

“So sappy, too”, he murmurs.

Hajime pushes himself off the floor to briefly ruffle Oikawa’s hair. “I’ll leave you to deal with your embarrassment. Text when you’re capable of more than insulting me again.”

Oikawa doesn’t protest, merely lifts his hand to lay it on top of his head where Hajime’s has been. Hajime makes it to the door before he turns again and fixes his best friend with a stern look.

“You’re enough, idiot.”

All the way down the stairs and out onto the street, he pretends not to know that Oikawa’s crying.

 

 

 

 

That night, Tooru sits himself down to make a pledge.

It is as if with a handful of words, Hajime has handed him agency over his own affairs. Has handed him enlightenment and a space to breathe in, and a reminder, Tooru thinks with a sour smile, of just how good Tooru is at driving himself into a metaphorical dead end until he’s unable to turn around, step back and observe. He has been working to remove that flaw on the court, diligently and determinedly, since that match where it has made him into a stepping stone for his genius _kouhai_ , but now he realizes that it has never been confined to the court. It is one thing to work around it in volleyball, but life is infinitely more complicated.

Still he understands that night that he’s been afraid (and he whispers it out loud to make it real, _I’ve been afraid_ ), afraid that a silent secret might be the reason he’d be losing Hajime, might be the first sign of that change, if only because the loss has always seemed to be lying in wait at the end of the road they took together. It has never been a conscious thought until Hajime came to point out its foolishness, to point out that there needn’t be an end if they are both determined enough to make it work – and that thus Tooru’s painful work of pulling them apart thread by strong thread before the tear could occur somewhere far beyond his control and far more devastating for it, that this work is unnecessary, and hereby undone.

So that night, Tooru makes a pledge that he will absolutely make sure that Hajime will remain his best friend, and he will deal with everything else as it arises.

After all, he thinks, next year is not far. It will see a new school, a new team, a myriad of new opportunities if they just open their hands and stretch far enough. Tooru will have Hajime’s steps beside him, his hands to bring the ball down unfailingly when Tooru sends it to him, a shoulder that stays still beneath his cheek when he falls asleep on the train, and Hajime’s worry and good sense and unwavering belief in him to edge them forwards despite all, and it will be enough, he tells himself, it’s enough.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have I intended Hajime to be super observant to light and small movements in his environment? *whispers* i haven't  
> Oikawa being absolutely hung up on overly complicated nature metaphors that no one else understands was, on the contrary, on purpose.


	4. Three Confessions: The Third

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Alright”, Matsukawa says. “I’ll answer your questions, but only after you answer one of mine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seijoh first years? Seijoh first years.

They’re drenched by the time they make it to the underpass. Somewhere along the still unfamiliar route through the city they have lost the others or taken a wrong turn, and then came the rain, clouding everything in grey.

“Doesn’t look like it’s stopping soon”, Matsukawa states, peering out into the solid wall of rain. “Maybe we better just wing it.”

“Let’s wait a bit.” Tooru turns on the flashlight on his phone and fiddles with it, lighting up their dreary concrete shelter, the graffiti on the walls and the odd stains on the floor. The searching beam catches twinkling on a crumpled soft drink can lying in a corner. “Eh, that’s depressing. Come on, find a remotely clean spot to sit and I’ll turn it off again.”

Matsukawa trudges away from the rain, but remains standing. Tooru looks at him expectantly. The little waving motion he makes with his phone is amplified on the walls so that their light sways wildly. In the shadows running over his face, Matsukawa’s expression is his usual closed-off calm.

“Suit yourself”, Tooru says, turning off the flashlight and plunging them into a half-dark.

“You’ll get sick sitting on that cold concrete. Besides, it’s disgusting here.”

Tooru hums, pocketing his phone. “I’m going to be starting setter in a bit, you know, so I need to get to know my team better. Tell me something about yourself. You have any siblings?”

“How is that relevant to volleyball?”

 _In many ways_ , Tooru could answer. But he pauses. The patter of rain on asphalt has turned into a wetter sound that’s slower to dissolve.

“Why are you like that with me, Mattsun? Always so uptight. You open up more even to Iwa-chan, and I’m a lot more approachable than him.”

Matsukawa’s shadowy form turns its head. Tooru’s vision is adjusting slowly, but towering over him the other is still shrouded in dark. He speaks without hesitation.

“I don’t like how you flaunt other people’s private affairs.”

“Ohh, does that mean you have a little secret?”

Oikawa Tooru can’t keep his mouth shut and it’s becoming a problem. He winces, but the taunting question is already out. Matsukawa, however, doesn’t react. He just regards Tooru from his half-lidded eyes and when he speaks, it’s a calm inquiry.

“You really are an asshole, aren’t you?”

“Apparently”, Tooru sighs. “I’m sorry.”

To his surprise, Matsukawa crouches down against the wall until his head is no higher than Tooru’s. It’s easier to see his face now. He looks calculating, almost – a look that makes Tooru sit up straighter, sends a thrill down his spine, sharp and competitive.

“Alright”, Matsukawa says. “I’ll answer your questions, but only after you answer one of mine.”

“You think you have a lever on me, Mattsun? That’s cute. Fire away.”

Matsukawa gives him a moment. Again, he doesn’t appear to be hesitating. Tooru recognizes a pause artfully set to heighten suspense.

“What’s the deal with you and Iwaizumi?”

That impassive, hooded gaze doesn’t betray anything. Yet something, a thin insistent voice is telling him that this is no bluff. That Matsukawa _knows_. A shiver runs through him that has nothing to do with the rain.

Tooru is still terrified. After all, it was not so long ago that he has felt like the ground was being ripped out from under his feet. He is still not rid of the guilt he feels whenever he catches his mother’s happy gaze caressing the top of Takeru’s head. He is still sometimes too fast in averting his eyes from the fluid motion with which Hajime pulls up his shirt, still sometimes counting the casual touches of the day and listening to his mind wonder, were there too few, too many?

But this secret is pounding against his ribs. It wants out, and with Tooru’s startled inhale the last of the hostility between them has fled the air, leaving only the smell of damp pavement and the stale odour of their shelter.

Tooru armours himself with a smile full of teeth and opens up.

“Oooh, Mattsun”, he murmurs, almost appreciative, “you’re dangerous.”

“I’m not just good at blocking because I’m tall”, Matsukawa says.

Tooru nods slowly. “I see that now.”

They fall into silence, listening to the gurgling of water outside. Then Matsukawa lowers himself fully to the floor. The movement draws Tooru’s attention away from the swirling curtain of rain.

“I have a sister”, he offers. Tooru’s silent nod is cut off midway when he continues: “She’s with a girl. They’re keeping it secret because her girlfriend’s parents wouldn’t approve.”

Tooru’s mouth curls around an exhale. Contrary to the image so carefully curated, he is an inherently private person – even Hajime is privy to most things only because of shared experience. But this, this is different. It’s a trade, secret for secret. And it’s here too that Tooru realizes he’s never admitted it to himself, aloud or in silence, has never sketched out the words, _I’m in love with my best friend_.

They’re too new, too raw to share. But he owes Matsukawa this secret, the one that uses his heartbeat to say _tell, tell, tell_. The words themselves are nothing spectacular. They should be easy to say, but his tongue ties itself around them, struggles to keep them in. It takes three tries – only when focus is shifted away from him as much as possible, a full sentence falls out.

“I’m not… we’re not… He can’t know.”

Matsukawa hums. He doesn’t say he understands, and Tooru is grateful for it. He puts out other words, though, gingerly spreads them on the ground between them for Tooru to consider. Offers them up like goods, like a skin to don if it fit.

“She said that possibly the worst thing was being all alone with it. Being scared, and angry, and confused, and only ever able to turn to yourself with your questions. The answers you received all yours and always the same.”

(Tooru would stretch out his hands and take it, would wear this first garment of companionship and understanding, and he thinks, _oh_.)

“You know, when she told us, my mother said it doesn’t matter, we’d love her regardless. She got so angry. It wasn’t our parents’ right to _consent_ to this, she said. Later she said she didn’t want to hear it, but she needed to. Because somehow it was so easy to convince herself that she was worth less for it. And although people would say things you wouldn’t want to hear, you need them. You need someone in on it, she said, or you’ll…”

Tooru wonders dimly whether he made a sound that stopped the flow of words. In the world outside their dim shelter a car horn blares. Inside, embarrassment keeps their heads turned away from each other; after all, they are barely sixteen, barely teammates. But below it lingers a tentative offer of help, stubbornly extended despite discomfort and wariness; and Tooru tries to convey his grateful acceptance just as silently and, for once, without ceremony.

When the screen of Matsukawa’s phone lights up, its bluish sheen pulls them back into a safer reality of practice runs and classmates and rain-soaked jerseys clinging cold against their skin. They both grab at that straw with the speed of drowning men.

“Hiro texted”, Matsukawa says, tapping at his phone. “They’re at a convenience store. Iwaizumi too. Lucky bastards.”

Tooru smirks. “Friends in dry places, how… convenient.” Over Matsukawa’s groan, he swipes his own phone and opens up a new message.

 

_You (17:46): ur in a great position to bring me milk bread_

_Iwa-chan (17:47): why would I do that_

 

“So stingy”, Tooru murmurs, scandalised. He turns to Matsukawa. “Hey, what’s your favourite snack?”

Matsukawa ponders this for a second. “I don’t like sweet stuff much. Reckon they can pass by the burger place on their way back?”

Tooru flashes him a delighted grin. “There’s a man after my own heart! Take a selfie with me, and do your best to look miserable, okay?”

They both squint at the glare of the flash, but it illuminates their faces to a neat, ghostly pale. Tooru wears his best puppy eyes and is proud to find that Matsukawa sports a stellar version of ‘sad and bedraggled’.

“Mattsun, great!”, he cheers. “You can act, too!”

“I’m a man of many talents”, Matsukawa says modestly.

“Where have you been all my life?”, Tooru sighs, and sends the picture.

“Burger steaks with cheese, please”, Matsukawa answers.

 

_You (19:53): [image attached]_

_You (19:54): bc we’re cold and stuck in this dreary, scary, smelly place_

_You (19:55): ps. mattsun likes these weird hamburger things with cheese in them_

_You (19:55) be sure to bring some of those too_

 

“Hey, the rain has let up”, Matsukawa says when Tooru finishes off his texts. “Let’s go, we’ll be just in time for our food.”

He stands and after a split second of again almost deliberate hesitation extends a hand. When Tooru takes it, it’s warm and dry, the grip firm. Tooru lets himself be pulled up.

He steps outside blinking, a few scattered raindrops cool on his face. They’re both stiff from sitting in the cold, so they start slowly and work themselves up to their usual pace. Only a few blocks later, in the almost invisible pool of light that a broken streetlamp throws on the pavement, adding to the day, Tooru turns his head. “Hey, Mattsun.”

They meet each other’s eyes without slowing. Matsukawa gives his smile, as minimal as most of his expressions, a stretching of closed lips. Tooru feels an answering smile erupt. He steers his feet right through the broadest puddle on their path, already picking up speed, and turns again to throw the challenge over the splash of Matsukawa’s feet in the same puddle as the rain begins to fall harder.

“Race you to the gym!”

 

 

 

 

(**)

 

 

 

 

“Iwa-chan”, Oikawa says.

Hajime, who is on his back on the floor, holding up the newest issue of _Volleyball Monthly_ , stops skimming an interview and waits. A breeze comes in from the window and ruffles the pages before Oikawa dives into the silence. He breaks the surface with too much force, head-first. The corners of Hajime’s mouth tighten with the knowledge that this is another one of those instances that have become almost common over the past months – instances of Oikawa gearing up to say something, only to lose courage mid-step.

“Anything interesting in there? You’re furrowing your brow so much. Or maybe that’s just your really uncomfortable reading position.” 

It’s a pitiful attempt. Hajime’s worry sits heavy and hot in his stomach; after all, he still thinks of indifferent pools of sunlight, of half an hour ripped out of time in an empty gym that refused to be shaken by the crying of a teenage boy. But this is different. He can’t put a finger on it to say exactly what it is, he never can.

Sometimes he wonders what it is that makes him notice – a hand half-curled, a degree of tension along the slope of Oikawa’s shoulders, or something subtler perhaps, because Oikawa is good at controlling his body, something that emanates from him regardless of the brightness of his smile, something that Hajime picks up on much like he used to pick up on a cicada’s hiding-place on scorching summer afternoons, instinct and experience revealing movement where by all rights none should be detectable.

This is not something to be solved by pressure, to be shaken out. It’s about careful approach, a body kept still and waiting.

So Hajime keeps his eyes on the magazine and shakes his head, “nah, nothing”, and lets silence envelop them again.

He steals glances with every turn of page, at the way Oikawa’s spine is curled to fit the lines of his bedding, the way his focus on the textbook in his hands is too deliberate. There’s something more. It hangs in the air like a thunderstorm does, hours before its arrival; the presence of a tension that wants relieving. Hajime keeps turning pages and waits.

Waits for the soft intake of breath, and is not surprised when it comes.

“Iwa-chan. I want to tell you something.”

Again, Oikawa stops short. This time, it’s more the sputtering out of an engine, surprised by its own power.

Hajime puts his hands, puts his magazine down and sits up on the floor in front of Oikawa’s bed. He keeps his voice as levelly as he can. “Okay. Tell me.”

Oikawa flicks the book shut with a motion of his wrist that is probably supposed to look unconcerned. From Hajime’s point of view, it looks hasty, nervous. His gaze strays, catching on sharp edges around the room, the corner of his desk, the rectangle of the magazine dark on the floor, the line of shelves on the wall. Hajime leans forward, more balancing himself out than indicating interest. It’s but the slightest movement, yet it startles Oikawa into recoiling.

“On second thought, maybe another time.”

He firmly faces a spot of wall over Hajime’s left shoulder, like almost looking at him is enough.

“You’re tired of this, though.”

Oikawa sighs his affirmation and shrugs with the one-shouldered gesture he has started to use when his indifference is faked. “It’s just that like this I can’t run away from Iwa-chan if I have to, I’m utterly helpleeeeeh?”

The word ends in an undignified squeak as Hajime tackles him, mindful of his knee but still with enough force to pin him in place with his own body. He’s warm and solid, and their faces are very close when Hajime narrows his eyes at him.

“Did you break something of mine again?”

Some of the tension leaves Oikawa’s frame as he huffs a laugh at Hajime’s mock-scowl. “No.”

There is a split-second of quiet in which Hajime tries to assess the sincerity of that laugh. That’s when he catches it – a flicker in Oikawa’s eyes, like he’s looking at something beautiful and terrifying, like he’s rearing up to match it, force with force. Hajime has only seen that expression up close a few times (it’s how Tobio was being looked at, sometimes, and a look that Ushijima has forfeited with his overwhelming dominance on court and his blundering earnestness that Tooru cannot recognize for what it is), so he can be forgiven for catching up with the danger only seconds later, when the ball is already in the air and Oikawa in running approach.

“Good for you”, Hajime says, at the same time as Oikawa says, “I also like boys.”

There it is, uttered in a flippant, almost challenging tone, like Hajime can’t feel Oikawa going rigid with tension under him. Uttered in a small voice, prematurely, not yet for the world to hear. Just for him. For some reason, it sucks the air out of him and Hajime has to take a deep breath before he can reply. It’s not necessarily that he is surprised. The thought might have been there at the back of his mind for a long time, maybe not even a thought yet, something unformed. He’s glad that Oikawa told him. Suddenly he is very aware of his own heartbeat.

“Are you shocked silent, Iwa-chan?”, Oikawa prompts. It comes out shakier that he probably intended.

Hajime realizes he’s been quiet for an unusually long moment.

“Sorry. That’s, um… good for you, I guess? What do I even reply to this? Thanks for telling me?”

He winces, but Oikawa laughs, a genuine one, relieved and delighted, and it clears up some of the strange tension clouding the air.

“You’re not surprised?”

“Now that you say it, it’s been on the list of things you’d be upset about without immediately telling me”, Hajime confesses. “Along with, you know, having given in to Ushijima and decided to transfer to Shiratorizawa for the rest of high school” (Oikawa scrunches up his face in disgust) “or actually having an honest crush on someone for once in your life” (Oikawa gives a strangled squeak that cuts Hajime off).

“You okay?”

“That’s rich coming from you!”, Oikawa complains, bringing his hands up to shove at Hajime’s shoulders. “At least I go on dates. Unlike you.”

“I don’t need to date”, Hajime says without thinking, his mind still strangely blank with relief and something indefinable, but wanting to keep up their banter, to make the rest of the tension in Oikawa’s shoulders go away, “I’ve got you.”

Silence settles heavily around them. Oikawa is looking up at him, lips parted with no sound, eyes huge, and a faint, pretty blush clinging to his cheekbones. Hajime goes back over what he said and feels his own face starting to burn in embarrassment. Oikawa trusted him, and Hajime has gone and propositioned him like an asshole.

“To take care of, I mean”, he adds hastily, feeling like he’s just thrashing around without actually improving the situation, “to, um, babysit…”, and then it hits him that he’s still lying on top of Oikawa, on his bed, joking about this, and that all of this is probably really, really bad timing.

“I’m, um… going to get off you, okay?” His voice sounds weird even over the rush of his own blood in his ears. He scrambles up quickly enough to see Oikawa’s face close off. Wrong thing to say. Could be misconstrued in so many ways, again.

“Shit, no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…” Hajime is so, so bad at this. He takes a deep breath, does not look at Oikawa’s face, and lets his body take over, settling back on Oikawa’s chest, face tucked into his shoulder, arms trying to take some of his weight so Oikawa can still breathe. The bones of Oikawa’s hip and shoulder are much sharper than they look. Hajime’s legs are still sticking out over the edge of the bed. This is still the position they have ended up in after he tackled Oikawa, intended to last for no longer than a few seconds before it became too uncomfortable or too close. He doesn’t care.

“I’m staying. You’re comfortable.”

He feels Oikawa’s chest move. The breath is long and shuddering, whether because of Hajime’s weight or because Oikawa is trying not to cry, he really can’t find out right now. His own breath is hot against his face in the small space between Oikawa’s shoulder and his blankets.

“Okay”, Oikawa whispers.

He still sounds kind of out of it. Hajime shifts a little to get a hand free, threads it into Oikawa’s soft hair to tell him that even if Hajime is ridiculously bad with words, he’s still here; that nothing of what they are has to change if Oikawa does not want it to.

Oikawa’s exhale is more of a sigh, but one of his hands comes up to wrap around Hajime’s arm and the other is light on his back, holding on to his shirt. But he’s not relaxing, no matter how much Hajime cards his fingers through his hair, and their silence isn’t a comfortable one. Hajime is not surprised when Oikawa speaks up.

“You should go home, Iwa-chan”, Oikawa says. He says it low, because he’s close to Hajime’s ear, but somehow it sounds like he couldn’t have spoken louder even if Hajime were on the other side of the room. Like that small voice is all he has right now. “We have a lot of homework to do.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

Oikawa’s nod makes his hair move against Hajime’s cheek. It’s even softer like that. Oikawa lets go of him and they sit up, still not quite looking at each other.

Hajime clears his throat. “Thanks for telling me.” 

Oikawa gives him a small smile and goes back to looking at his hands.

“Don’t be embarrassed about this, idiot. Go do your homework, and if you don’t text me an obnoxious amount of times like you usually do, I’ll come over and kick you out of your misery. Got it?”

This time, when Oikawa looks up, his eyes are gleaming. “Is that express permission to send you as many messages as I please, Iwa-chan? My, so generous!”

Hajime chucks a pencil at him and leaves. From the street, the glass of Oikawa’s window shows nothing but a reflection of the sky. Hajime thinks briefly of façades. But speculation rarely leads anywhere with Oikawa; and over the years Hajime has learned to take the secrets as they come. So he does what he does best and moves on, goes back to the tasks at hand and fills the strange, clouded emptiness in his mind with his history and chemistry assignments, and then, slowly, with the bell sound of Oikawa’s incoming messages.

They are going to be okay. They always are.

And if he sometimes thinks of the solid warmth of Oikawa’s body, of his heartbeat quick against Hajime’s own, that is not a matter of speculation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hajime will think about this at some point, I promise.


	5. An Archaeology of Affection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The overgrown path behind their backyards is now a symbol of what they are going to lose: a distance to be covered barefoot, in an instant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We've reached the penultimate chapter! Or: in which they graduate and Hajime thinks about a few things (not necessarily in that order). I hope you enjoy reading this at least half as much as I enjoyed writing it.

For Hajime, it is a riddle and simultaneously so evident. It fills his chest, surging like water, paints heat up his neck. He feels somehow that he will come to move through it like through air, effortlessly and at home, but there is this strange and exciting period of acquaintance despite the lack of a simple starting point. He can’t remember the beginning. In retrospect, it eats up his days, makes them its own until it feels like his heart has always been in his throat at the smile thrown over Oikawa’s shoulder, at the stilling of his fingers on Hajime’s sleeve. He spends weeks unravelling, unearthing, going further back with each examined feeling that is the same as the one before, until he thinks that beginnings are hardly what matters. 

After all, his beginnings with Oikawa are always interruptions from outside, always prompts by other people. On their own, Hajime is comfortable. Shifts between them are, as far as he feels them, minuscule. It’s others who bring the earthquakes, the questioning, the demand for definition.

It’s their neighbour two houses down, who used to watch them when they ambled down the street with their clasped hands swinging between them, and who beckoned them closer one afternoon to mumble with averted eyes, shouldn’t you stop doing this lest people might get the wrong idea? The sudden absence of Oikawa’s hand hangs between them like a question. He always leans on their hands, fingers clasped too tightly, distributing part of his weight onto Hajime, and Hajime always complains. The lack of it leaves him off balance. For weeks on their walks home, his left hand lives in his pocket, unsure of its place.

It’s Oikawa’s first proper girlfriend, who is fifteen with emotions that flare in the corridors between their classrooms. She comes to the school roof later during lunch to lay her head on Oikawa’s shoulder and listen to him laugh it off. This quiet girl who carries a violin case with the same reverence Oikawa carries a ball. This girl with a braid whose end is wrapped around her index finger, unwrapped, wrapped again ceaselessly, a girl with fingers as indefatigable as Oikawa’s own, who misses dates because she was practising and who knows unfailingly where to find him when it’s him who forgets. This slim girl with fury in the lines of her body who corners Oikawa in the emptied hallway painted almost warm by the setting sun, who puts her finger on his chest and says quietly, clearly, _if you don’t stop sleeping in his sweater we’re over_. From that place her eyes carefully avoid, Hajime watches her finger shake with the relief of something long thought over and finally released.

“I didn’t even know you did that”, he says later when they are alone. The long, lean shadow of a sash bar falls across Oikawa’s face, unmoving when he shrugs.

“You left one at mine at some point. It’s warm”, he says, and then, almost as an afterthought, “and far too ugly to wear anywhere outside. I’m doing you a favour, really.”

Hajime scowls. He forgets to demand it back. It is still returned to him two days later, washed and neatly folded, in a plastic bag delivered to his mother. Oikawa’s relationship dissolves the same way, promptly and quietly. His girlfriend needs more time to focus on the violin.

At that time, perhaps, Hajime didn’t give much thought to the idea of Oikawa curled up in the old blue sweater. After all, Oikawa always borrows his things and forgets to return them, has done so with that one bento box Hajime had when they were little, with several manga series they liked to read, with countless pens or pairs of socks. Now that the memory is stirred by his excavations, the ripples in its surface form unfamiliar and unbidden images of Oikawa’s pale cheek against the dark fabric, colour disappearing into the secret space between a body and a blanket, the smell of Oikawa’s detergent clinging to something soft. Does he remember lifting the sweater to his face when it was returned, or a pang of disappointment at Oikawa’s parting with it? He catalogues these questions carefully as they emerge, catalogues the blurring of now and then as he follows the strings of a feeling back and along.

A couple passes him on the street one day, glimpsed for a moment among the mass of shoppers. They let go of each other’s hands like one unfolds their own crossed arms, their connection just as evident with a hand’s breadth of space between them. They pass him and are swallowed by the crowd, but the easy way their fingers slipped apart follows him for a while, half-remembered every time he watches Oikawa’s shoulder edge around his own.

Hajime stops going back one morning when he steps out onto sun-soaked concrete, stops at Matsukawa’s lazy wink that he suddenly, inexplicably can’t place, a wink thrown across the school roof, across Oikawa’s head pillowed on Matsukawa’s lap. Hajime’s instincts scream provocation, whisper ownership before he clamps down on them. One of Oikawa’s eyes catches his, blinking from under his fringe. Hajime half waits for a sly comment, but Oikawa just looks at him, searching, until Hajime averts his gaze and prods him with a foot instead.

Their beginning stretches out and back, impossible to trace.

 

 

 

 

(He adds one last, tentative question to his pile: does all this emerge only in the face of a potential end?)

 

 

 

 

“D’you think this is the last time?” Oikawa asks. It’s garbled because his mouth is full of ice cream, like the thought didn’t leave him time to swallow.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full”, Hajime says automatically. “The last time of what?”

“Ice cream, of course.”

A flight of birds billows across the sky and settles on the telephone wires at the corner of the street, dark shapes sharply outlined against the spectacular sunset that Oikawa dragged him out to watch. The pavement is cool and rough under his hands. A group of girls spills out the doors of the convenience store, their high-pitched voices and laughter carried over by the wind. It’s almost too cold to sit like that.

“Pretty sure it’s not, because you’re going to make me enact nostalgic and artificial repetitions of it whenever we’re home for the holidays.”

Oikawa shakes his head. “I don’t think I will. It’s never the same. Just… don’t you think it’s strange that most things end in such nondescript ways? You’ll stop chopping vegetables for dinner years later and think, whenever was the last time I went to get ice cream with Iwa-chan? You know, it’s like endings just disappear if you don’t watch out for them.”

“Well, then don’t. It’s a stupid thing to do anyway.”

Oikawa snorts. “Trust you to make this prosaic.”

Hajime nudges the hand that holds Oikawa’s ice cream towards his mouth. His skin is warm and smooth and Hajime thinks about maybe not pulling away, imagines the rapid transition of Oikawa’s eyes from surprise to something narrowed, not warm and bright with unsurprised contentment at a touch that lingers. He takes his hand back to himself. “Eat. It’s melting.”

When Oikawa obediently takes a bite, he continues. “I just don’t think that this ending is so different from all the ones before that you didn’t notice. We stopped fighting over which flavour to buy when we could afford to buy two. Or, at some point, you stopped eating this abominable blue stuff that you swore you’d like forever when you were five. You stopped skipping every second step on the way here because you no longer thought if you did that without a fault they’d have strawberry flavour in stock. You didn’t mourn all those things, so why mourn this now? We’ll just eat ice cream in a different place.”

His face burns like he said something embarrassing. Instead of answering, Oikawa stuffs the entire rest of his cone into his mouth and promptly blames his watering eyes on the cold.

Hajime watches the birds sway on the wires, wonders how they feel resting on a line that runs on and on. When he turns back, Oikawa is dry-eyed and pushing himself off the ground, going on about how he wants to try a soda-flavoured popsicle again now that Iwa-chan has reminded him. Hajime turns his back on the birds (he’ll find out soon enough) and follows, easily like he always has.

 

 

 

 

(He refuses that possibility.)

 

 

 

 

Looking back, the last month before Oikawa goes to Tokyo is composed mostly of stills.

Graduation, a cavernous room thrumming with emotion that oozes from a crowd too large to oversee; his friends’ moments carved in bright light standing out strangely in his memory. Matsukawa, moving in his formal clothes like he belongs in them; Hanamaki’s bow deep and formal, uncharacteristically unironic. Oikawa’s fluid grace and his eyes at ease as he surveys the crowd, meets the rising cheers with practiced charm and real delight. In that moment, Hajime’s decision settles in his stomach, comfortable and firm.

(His father’s furrowed brow as he walks into a room where the air is heavy with one of their arguments on who should tell whom first. The colours on their university acceptance letters laid out side by side, a puzzle. The look on Oikawa’s face as they reach out simultaneously to pick up the ones they’ve chosen, like he is not sure what to feel in the face of the distance that looms sudden in their hands, a look that echoes Hajime’s own sentiment.

The overgrown path behind their backyards is now a symbol of what they are going to lose: a distance to be covered barefoot, in an instant.)

Steam rising from their ramen bowls at what they collectively and too vigorously insist is not a farewell dinner, the soft click of Matsukawa’s chopsticks on the counter when they fall out of his hands as he laughs at a joke of Hanamaki’s. The warmth of Oikawa’s hand on his shoulder as they crowd together in front of his phone camera for a selfie he proceeds to send to the volleyball team group chat with an abundance of teary-eyed emoji, entirely defying the purpose of a not-farewell dinner, as Hanamaki does not fail to point out underneath Oikawa’s flood of messages and the single sympathetically sad one from Kindaichi that immediately came in.

(Not how they said goodbye to each other, because they didn’t. There had just been the soft spring air and Hanamaki’s retreating back, legs furiously pedalling, and the back of Matsukawa’s head, visible over Hanamaki’s shoulders, from where he was precariously perched on the handlebar, and then a hand, waving, a swerve from the bike, and laughter ringing out.

“They’re gonna crash one day”, Hajime had observed.

“Don’t be so pessimistic, Iwa-chan”, Oikawa had answered, and given a single sniffle.)

The pile of moving crates in the middle of his room, dust motes lazily settling on their dull cardboard colour that swallowed the light trickling in from the half-open window; the thick red pen, cool in his grasp, with which he’d carefully labelled Oikawa’s boxes (“But you’re destroying the element of surprise, Iwa-chan!”). The mark in his mother’s kitchen calendar that blocks a day of his parents’ weekend to help him move. Oikawa announcing that his own parents were out of town for a week – his smile sharp in the way a too-bright beam of light is, sharp and daring Hajime to challenge its cheerfulness and triumph.

(“I’ll drive you, then”, Hajime says, “your parents shouldn’t trust you with their car.” Oikawa’s hard gaze flickers, shifts.)

That last month is composed of stills, and of almost-touches. Of the finger’s breadth of space between their thighs when they ride the train, all the more noticeable for the easy bumping of their shoulders and elbows. Of Oikawa’s quiet breaths when they lie on their backs on a velvety spring afternoon, looking into a clear sky, breaths that could be warm on Hajime’s cheek if he moved his head an inch to the side. Of fingers curled, held back from reaching out to brush over the hem of a shirt, the curve of a shoulder, the soft fringe that falls over Oikawa’s eyes.

Sometimes he catches Oikawa looking and thinks he must feel it too. The decision not to act on it is unspoken, and mutual. Too fragile their equilibrium in these final days to deal with such a monumental disruption. Only months, perhaps years later will Hajime be astonished by the calm with which he acknowledged, and postponed, the possibilities between them. No grand declarations, no nervous wondering whether this, here, today will be the end of them, no breathless laughter at the thought of so many wasted days, months, years, had they just known sooner. Just amidst the general turmoil of their lives being turned upside down the silent moment of a glance caught, a movement checked, an understanding reached.

To be so sure of each other is a gift whose dimensions he cannot fathom just then.

What he can fathom is the gift of Oikawa’s trust, and it makes him curl his fingers tighter at the sight of an easy smile mirrored by a greasy window, smudged by the landscape speeding past outside, to not reach out and hold his best friend’s hand on the train, unafraid.

 

 

 

 

Oikawa is quiet and subdued during their drive to Tokyo, growing more so as they approach the outskirts of the city, and ultimately only speaking up to read Hajime directions from the map on his phone. Hajime leaves him be, too focused on traffic to offer much in terms of a distraction. He knows Oikawa – before long, his curiosity will win out over whatever nostalgia he’s dealing with right now. Although, he thinks a little later when he notices for the third time the sullen angle of Oikawa’s head against the window, maybe he can accelerate the process a bit.

“Hey, want to check out the gym before we do the actual moving?”

Oikawa perks up at that and starts poking his phone to change their route. The gym, it turns out an hour later, is not open to the public, but its large windows show shining courts below endless rows of stands. Oikawa keeps his forehead pressed to the glass for a long time. When he turns around, his face is alive with something fierce. Hajime’s heart trips at that expression – or maybe at the way Oikawa’s voice cuts the morning like glass, sharp and sure.

“I can’t wait to play against you on that stage.”

“I’ll crush you”, Hajime returns, because that’s how they have responded to each other’s challenges all their lives.

Oikawa smiles, slow and dangerous. Hajime feels the ground solid below his feet with the sudden knowledge that distance is the smallest threat to their connection. He returns the smile, because what else is there to do?

They have to reroute three times on the rest of the way, because Oikawa is too busy planning out their bright future to alert Hajime to lane changes in time. It’s midday before they have dealt with paperwork and keys and can start piling crates into the old elevator. It moves with precariously irregular speed, stops at ground level to take in a bored-looking girl with a messenger bag slung over her shoulders, and then stops again at the seventh floor to let her out. Oikawa’s eyes trail from the corridor that opens up beyond the elevator doors to the stained metal plate inside with its numbered buttons, and climb up.

“So many people live here”, he breathes, absent-mindedly as if the observation was made for him alone. Hajime eyes the long line of doors marching away into the half-dark of the windowless hallway and thinks he understands – each rectangle of cheap wood marks the entrance into the space of another human being, hundreds of lives as vast and sprawling as their own pressed into the same rooms, condensed into a desk, a bed, a shelf. He watches a sense of opportunity and adventure flicker over Oikawa’s face and is glad.

They don’t finish unpacking until half past six and by then they are both starving, so they set out for an early dinner. They walk slowly, Oikawa setting the pace, and finally end up in one of the hole-in-the-wall restaurants that line the streets of the neighbourhood, squeezed opposite each other between two tables occupied by groups of businessmen. The ones on their left look barely older than thirty and talk with sober faces and measured gestures. The group to their right is older and raucous; Hajime has to lean close to hear when Oikawa is talking.

What he says now is this: “I think I want to have a beer.”

Hajime doesn’t say, _you don’t even like the taste_ , or _do you want to get into trouble_ , or _no one’s gonna sell you one anyway_. He says instead, “stop making everything a ceremony.”

Oikawa grins, blindingly bright. “Ah, how well Iwa-chan knows me.”

He orders one anyway. Hajime follows suit, because he never backs out on stupid things Oikawa starts, and because he does like the taste. The waiter nods and dashes on to the next table without sparing them a second glance – Oikawa looks triumphant.

They wander the streets aimlessly for a while after dinner, both tired but not quite ready to end the day. Oikawa keeps his leisurely pace, peering into shops and dipping into alleys at random. Hajime tries to imagine him living here, sees him frequenting that coffee shop on his way to classes, bag slung over his shoulder and wearing his glasses, or carrying a shopping bag like the woman in front of them, tired after practice, perhaps still in tracksuit pants and with his hair wet from the shower – perhaps he’ll do that here, in this anonymous place. He imagines him opening his small window to look out over the city lights and thinks suddenly, _he’ll miss the stars_. But maybe Tokyo is bright enough for a while, because next to him, Oikawa is drinking in the fast-paced beat of the city with his eyes wide.

“I guess that’s my cue”, Hajime says reluctantly when they end up in front of Oikawa’s building more by chance than by any real idea of where they were going. “I _do_ have to drive back early tomorrow.”

Oikawa’s shoulders slump a little, but he nods. Hajime understands suddenly that in the past hours he has witnessed the drawing out of an evening. With his remark and the keys jingling in Oikawa’s hands, they are back at a threshold, the acute sense of an ending hanging over them anew.

They stand alone in the elevator that carries them up, up. It jerks to a stop unbidden at an empty floor, and in the seconds where between the opening doors they glimpse a deserted hallway, Oikawa falls back against the mirror. Hajime presses the button that closes the doors.

For a brief moment, he thinks of offering a hug. But the elevator stops again, the doors slide open and they emerge into the hallway without so much as a word having passed between them. Find the light switch. Find the door. Find a bottle of water to share among the detritus of possessions still piled haphazardly around the small room. Oikawa’s back is broad in front of the window; the movement of his throat as he drinks draws Hajime’s eyes.

Hajime sits down on the floor. He keeps his fingers steady as they take the opened bottle from Oikawa’s hands, doesn’t look at the way Oikawa keeps watching him, absently, perhaps just as distracted as Hajime is by the sudden and almost bodily presence of what could happen. He thinks of all the other bottles they have shared and wonders how often Oikawa has been there, in a room with this persistent thought. Abruptly, he flattens the empty bottle to throw it away.

The noise makes Oikawa flinch. He’s still standing by the window, head angled downwards. His body is very still, but his fingertips make small twitchy movements, searching for something to hold onto. Hajime knows that look, and he’ll be damned if he lets Oikawa do this now, if he lets him make all this so much harder for both of them. So when Oikawa takes a deep breath and opens his mouth, Hajime cuts him off.

“Don’t”, he says, “it’s not a good time.”

He’s surprised at how softly it comes out.

Oikawa looks almost relieved.

“C’mere.” Hajime pats the floor beside him. “No more teary-eyed stuff today, okay? Here, lie down with me and look at your nerdy ceiling.”

“This place is a cupboard”, Oikawa complains, but he eases himself into the small space between the desk and Hajime on the floor, sticking one elbow under the shelf and the other one into Hajime’s ribs, and obediently trains his eyes on the glow-in-the-dark stars they have spent an hour sticking onto the ceiling. At least they form constellations this time.

“Yeah, but it’s your cupboard. Be a little grateful, will you?”

“Not my forte, remember?”, Oikawa murmurs, but his voice is a little lighter.

They lie still for a while and watch the night come. The darkening of the sky is barely visible with the bluish and yellow sheen of the city lights through the narrow window. Slowly, the stars on the ceiling begin to emit their glow. Hajime is almost asleep on the cold, hard floor, exhausted from a day of driving and hauling boxes, when Oikawa reaches for his hand and tangles their fingers together. It’s a slow, deliberate movement, done in silence and without pretence. Hajime swallows. He squeezes back, briefly, and Oikawa flinches almost guiltily, but neither withdraws their hand or speaks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *screams into the void* i love them so much


	6. As Good As Any

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The world doesn’t shift. The ground doesn’t shake, and yet that one passing second pulses, thrums, Tooru thinks, there’s a tremor, a speeding up or slowing down of time, or maybe that’s just his heart. It’s minute; he sucks in a breath and they’re back to normal, two boys standing in a crowd, Tooru’s bags at their feet and the smell of donuts wafting over from the shop window.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The final chapter! In which, among other things, Oikawa Tooru takes a bath and a picture of the sunrise.

Two days after Tokyo, standing on the curb of yet another unfamiliar city, Hajime watches the taillights of his father’s car weave into the evening traffic and become indiscernible. He takes the stairs back up to the twelfth floor and the red door with a number painted on that fits the one on his new key. The ceiling lamp had been burning when he shut the door to accompany his parents down, and on its opening the light is still there, undisturbed.

The room is as small as Oikawa’s in Tokyo, and as characterless by nature. But minutes ago, from the door handle had hung his father’s light brown jacket. In the tiny sink beside the door is the dark line of a single long hair. The chair by the desk is left facing the room like his father leaves all his chairs turned towards what has held his interest most recently. His pens are arranged neatly on the scuffed desk by the hands of his mother, forever straightening things when her mind is occupied elsewhere. His pillow smoothed out with care, a book half pulled from the row of others to be looked at and forgotten. Already there are memories in the room.

The tangible presence of his family says that lives are not begun anew like this, merely expanded; the threads of their connections now running along roads and train tracks and telephone wires, following the two-coloured maps of text conversations; their components translated, shared meals into weekly phone calls – worry and affection less immediate, but no less valid. He doesn’t remember Oikawa’s face in the rear view mirror, but knows the places where fingertips rested against his skin, and hopes that the imprints of their bodies on the floor made Oikawa’s room feel as safe for him.

Hajime turns the creaky chair back to face the window that looks out on the great grey façade of another building and watches as it slowly comes alive with the lights of a hundred lives like his own.

Oikawa messages him late that night. He doesn’t inquire after the move or demands pictures, and there are no follow-ups pressing for immediate attention. As Hajime reads, he becomes suddenly aware of the low buzzing of the ceiling lamp which, once noticed, casts in sharp relief the unfamiliar shapes and corners of the room.

 

_Oikawa (01:56): since iwa-chan has abandoned me in tokyo i need to find replacement friends to eat my lunch with_

_Oikawa (01:57): it’s not like i’m not already in demand here ( ᵘ ᵕ ᵘ *)_

 

Hajime types out his answer slowly, as if waiting. He makes it into something measured that doesn’t sound much like himself – but they have left steady ground weeks ago, so who could possibly know what they are supposed to sound like? He thinks it bitterly for the first time, and is so surprised that he hits _send_.

 

_You (02:02): Please get yourself those friends. Make sure to get the kind that doesn’t mind you leaning on them or sleeping on them during lunch. Extra credit if they pet your hair when you’re well-behaved._

After a second of deliberation, he adds _(dumbass)_ in a second message. After all, there are rules for how to tell Oikawa things that Hajime hasn’t quite figured out himself beyond the part that means _you worry too much and I worry, too_.

He goes to bed then, and in the dark listens to noises he knows will become familiar soon.

Oikawa has read the messages at around three a.m., he finds in the morning, but there is no reply and they don’t touch on the subject anymore. Instead, Oikawa sends cheerful selfies from his tours around Tokyo, delights in informing Hajime about the things that are wrong with his room or the building in general, and complains about his impatience for volleyball practice to start.

They’re drifting, Hajime thinks, idly flipping through a series of pictures of dead fish Oikawa had sent him from a market that morning. (Most are captioned with the name of a player from one or the other rival team; the rest bear various versions of _(╬_ _ಠ_ _益_ _ಠ_ _) iwa-chan look its your grumpy face!!!_ ) _._ They don’t settle into a rhythm yet – it all feels transitory, as if they were both aware that their routines are not laid out yet and that whatever habits they form now might be too easily shattered in the first week of university, crushed by their workloads, schedules, or social lives.

And then suddenly it is that first week of university, there are seats to obtain and friends to make, lecture halls to find and suggestions for good lunch spots to swap. Hajime’s first volleyball practice will not be until Thursday, but Oikawa’s starts on Tuesday. Hajime knows that from the brightly coloured schedule that Oikawa emailed him and insisted that he tack it up over his desk, next to his own. So on Tuesday evening, he looks up from his reading at regular intervals to check his phone for the time or new messages, and when they start rolling in, he puts his highlighter down and leans back to listen.

 

_Oikawa (21:43): iwa-chan you will NOT BELIUEVE who was at tryouts 2day_

_You (21:45): You’ve been typing for two minutes. Must be someone big_

_Oikawa (21:45): karasunos captain_

_Oikawa (21:45): iwa-chan_

_Oikawa (21:45): KARASUNOS CAPTAIN_

_You (21:46): So was he scouted too?_

_Oikawa (21:46): why are u so calm abt this???_

_Oikawa (21:47): and no, apparently hes here for the business school and ‘just wants to try his luck’_

_You (21:48): Wow, I’ve never actually seen you use quotation marks_

_Oikawa (21:50): I need 2 distance myself from the enemy’s remarks iwa-chan_

_You (21:51): He’s not actually your enemy anymore if you’re going to play on the same team though_

_Oikawa (21:51): wow proper moral support there ok bye_

_You (21:52): I’ll talk to you tomorrow_

_Oikawa (21:52) iwa-chan wait!!! i’m not done telling u stuff_

_Oikawa (21:53) dont you wanna hear the story abt how crow captain got lost twice trying to go grocery shopping??_

_You (21:54): Shoot._

_Oikawa (21:56): actually that’s the story. He got lost. Twice this week. Getting groceries. Apparently his sense of direction is terrible_

_Oikawa (21:57): u kno whats the most terrible thing abt this?_

_Oikawa (21:57): he just admits to it_

_You (21:57): :D_

_Oikawa (21:57): I got u to use emoticons!!! an emoticon. a single one._

_Oikawa (21:58): sad and lonely_

_You (21:58): Actually we knew he was a pretty confident guy already after that first practice match, so I’m not surprised_

_You (21:59): Sawamura’s story did. Not you._

_Oikawa (22:00): rude iwa-chan_

_You (22:04): So he just randomly told you about his misadventures in adult life?_

_Oikawa (22:09): iwa-chan where r u rn?_

_You (22:10): At home. You calling?_

 

Oikawa’s call comes in without a reply. Hajime picks up and immediately hears that he is in a public space. There’s noise and voices around him, echoing a bit.

“I’m just walking back from the trains”, he explains, voice hushed and without a greeting, effortlessly carrying on their conversation. “It’s kind of a longish story if Iwa-chan wants to hear it properly, and I’m too lazy to type it out.”

Hajime settles into his chair more comfortably and makes an encouraging sort of noise, and Oikawa sets off.

They fall into a pattern quickly; conversations squeezed into little pockets of time during the day, into train rides and walks across campus, messages typed out waiting in lunch lines: small habits forming at the fringes of their days. The things they know about each other now are different – great chunks of life missing, others displayed in minute detail. They use an even greater amount of banter now, Hajime thinks, but it carries undertones of something honest much more often than it did before.

 

 

 

 

_[09. May]_

_Oikawa (00:14): im sorry today was wild_

_You (00:17): It’s okay, I’m pretty swamped with homework, too. What happened?_

_Oikawa (00:20): its just… a lot to take in_

_Oikawa (00:23): and practice is great but itll take a while to adapt to everyone bc theres just so many of them_

_You (00:24): You’re asleep on your feet, how about you go to bed?_

_Oikawa (00:26): will do_

_Oikawa (00:27): thx mum_

_You (00:27): Shut up_

_You (00:30): Good night_

_Oikawa (00:39): gn_

 

 

_[10. May]_

_Oikawa (06:52): [attached image]_

_You (06:55): I could habve had 8 more minutes of sleep_

_Oikawa (06:57): [attached image]_

_You (07:11): how can you be so awake so early in the morning its uncannny_

_Oikawa (07:11): im a man of many mysteries_

_You (07:12): …_

_Oikawa (07:12): I know the face youre making_

_You (07:13): Good._

_Oikawa (07:13): ooh the punctuation has come out_

_Oikawa (07:13): iwa-chan is waking up_

_You (07:13): As much as I appreciate my daily Tokyo sunrise, please send it after 7_

_Oikawa (07:14): ur such a spoilsport_

_Oikawa (07:14): I go to great lengths to share this joy w/ u while its still fresh_

_You (07:15): Sunrise today was two hours ago, Oikawa_

_Oikawa (07:16): such a spoilsport iwa-chan_

 

 

Hajime leaves his phone on the bed, facedown between the rumpled sheets. In the silence of the empty staircase and over the noise of the kettle, he tries not to count the too few hours of sleep Oikawa must have had. (Four.) In the dirty glass of the kitchen windows he watches the reflections of other people move behind him, spectres of grey and green and darker colours ghosting over the skyline of a city composed of much the same tones. The curve of his tea cup is warm against his palms, anchoring fingers that itch to take action.

Without their bodies, they are forced into the verbal. While he slowly discovers the syntax behind absent punctuation and Oikawa’s irregular use of abbreviations, Hajime begins to understand how dependent he has always been on all the things Oikawa did not say. And as he watches Oikawa’s easy way of slipping away from unpleasant questions he understands, too, how his own body has always been essential in holding them together. There are things that are now much harder to say. _Did you get enough sleep_ is something he has stopped asking within the first weeks. _Be careful_ and _have you eaten_ have disappeared alongside it. And he has never so much as attempted to touch on the old injury and to ask out loud whether Oikawa is being honest about it to the important people.

He learns to employ absences, and hopes that they speak to Oikawa the same way Oikawa’s silences speak to him.

Sometimes, they go for days without talking.

Once, Hajime wakes in cold sweat with Oikawa’s voice in his ear whispering _my perfect trust in you_. The nightmare he cannot recall.

On mornings like those, Hajime keeps his fingers still and learns to disentangle himself, somewhere on the ever-shifting line between separate and apart. Mapping the territory that emerges between them, its sudden pitfalls and familiar grounds, some things are much harder to say than before. But there are also things that are much easier.

 

 

 

 

On the first ring, Tooru hugs himself with his free arm, listening to the water as it fills the tub. It’s almost the same noise as the rain was before, minus the busy undertones of the city – a steady, sibilant rush. He feels detached, alive only where the case of his phone is pressed into his palm, to his ear between the cool paths the drops are still forging on his cheeks, running from hair into collar and down.

Second ring.

“Kou-chan”, he had said over the drumming of the warm rain. Cascades of it had fallen from the edge of his umbrella, streaked blue and white and yellow by the city lights. “I know you don’t have my delicate build, but you’re hogging my dry space.”

Bokuto had shuffled miserably to the right. “My hair is getting wet.”

“So’s mine. And I am sharing this umbrella with you, which means that by all rights the only one whose hair should be getting wet is you.”

His stern glare had faltered at the sight of Bokuto’s face tightening into a sneeze. For someone so loud and powerful, his sneezes seemed surprisingly small – but then again, Tooru had picked apart Bokuto’s boisterous presence within the first few minutes of their first practice together, when he mapped the multitude of tiniest glances that fuelled his loud energy. They are far more noticeable in person than on screen, quick and minute, dashing from teammates to coaches down to his own hands, seeking affirmation. They make his shoulders into something restless, like a large body of water holds movement in secret under a deceptively still surface.

During their school days, he had regarded Bokuto with something like condescension – an instinctive reaction of aloofness towards a trait he despised in himself: they were both players who knew their insecurities intimately. As a teammate, Bokuto is someone with raw power on the court who needs a sense of security that is entirely Tooru’s to provide. Tooru tells himself he likes that challenge, but admits in quiet too that he likes this boy who picks up ten others with just the force of his smile, but cannot pick up himself.

He has just possibly liked him from the beginning (which is a scene of two with Tooru on the floor doing his stretches when someone bursts into his space, a broad figure unabashedly clad in a Fukurodani uniform and spiky hair of matching colours, and a voice cuts through the quiet chatter in the gym: “Hey! You’re the guy who has cute nicknames for everyone! I want a cute nickname, too!”) or, at the very latest, from the aftermath of their third practice (a group picture, that one, of the stunned silence after Bokuto had asked their captain for a moment to speak to the team and then announced that he really liked baking cookies, and did anybody have any allergies? Tooru had met his hopeful smile with something genuine startled out of him, and had thus resigned himself to his fate).

They walk to the trains together on most nights, as they are often the last to leave the showers. This is why, on this evening full of blurred car lights and shadows made into puddles and the umbrella still dripping into his hair, long wet fingertips moving over his scalp, Tooru can lean into Bokuto to bodily push him further to the right.

“Sharing means both of our hair gets wet!”, Bokuto protests and tries to nudge Tooru out from under the umbrella. Since Tooru is holding it, however, he only succeeds in depriving himself of its shelter, and Tooru is quick to dance further out of reach, cackling at the way Bokuto’s hair has started to droop heavy and wet. His entire left side is soaked and quickly cooling, his gym bag is dripping, and his toes make squishy noises in his shoes with every step. Then Bokuto pushes his hair out of his eyes with the back of his hand and launches himself at Tooru with a war cry, and everything becomes a blur.

Third ring.

Tooru watches steam curl lazily over the surface of the bath. He secures the phone between his ear and shoulder and starts peeling off his clammy clothes. The click of the tap as he closes it echoes the click of the umbrella folding itself up, and Bokuto’s delighted grin flashes white as they trudge by a street lamp.

“The last time I got this wet on purpose was when I was like six”, he sighs. “It’s amazing.”

“And here I was, thinking I’d seen you take a shower just minutes ago”, Tooru says drily. But he surreptitiously spreads out his fingers to catch more of the water that runs from his sleeves, his hair, the sky. And Bokuto, too, is good at reading people, so he notices the subtle tilt of Tooru’s face towards the coming of the rain and is immediately mollified.

They move like this for two, three street lights, until the spring in Bokuto’s steps falters and he starts sidling closer to Tooru.

“It gets kind of cold, though.” He sounds disappointed.

Tooru keeps looking ahead as Bokuto creeps closer. There is something exhilarating in being on the receiving end of this slow approach. The tentative press of Bokuto’s shoulder against his own is cold at first, then warmer as the heat of his body starts to seep through layers of soaked fabric. When another step without resistance grants permission to touch, Bokuto relaxes against his side. An arm comes to rest heavily around his shoulders.

In a flash, Tooru is thrown back two hours onto the court, to a perfect toss and the curve of Bokuto’s arm in a perfect spike, to Bokuto’s yell and his arms around Tooru’s neck, his weight sudden on Tooru’s body, and both of them tumbling down. It comes to him then, in the quiet way of something very logical: while playing with Hajime will always be the pinnacle, while Tooru’s tosses to him will always feel like his best ones, that is because of how much they share, how intimately they know each other. It is a matter of them, not of volleyball.

His exhale, once started, doesn’t seem to stop. In front of him, the lights of the train station begin to flicker dimly into view.

“Kou-chan.” An inhale, as long and as unsteady. “That was a great spike earlier. I’ll catch you next time.”

Bokuto laughs and squeezes him, and it is then that he feels a grudge slowly beginning to dissipate, a nagging feeling of betrayal, of having been sent away to Tokyo on his own.

Hajime picks up on the fourth ring, and Tooru tells him this breathlessly, his voice full of wonder, tells him: “I was angry at you for leaving me this whole time.”

“Oh, good”, Hajime says, “you’ve figured it out.”

“No thanks to you”, Tooru sniffs, voice muffled by the shirt he’s pulling over his head.

Hajime murmurs something that is probably an insult to Tooru’s brain capacity, but it is lost as Tooru sets his phone on the edge of the tub and climbs in.

“Oikawa.” Hajime’s voice sounds tinny over the speakers and the splash of water around his legs, then his body. “Are you taking a bath?”

“Mmmh.” Perhaps, with effort, he could have produced more than a satisfied hum. But the water closes warm over his shoulders and he tips his head back, focusing only on the heat and the darkness.

“You’re so fucking weird.”

“Don’t get flustered, Iwa-chan. You’ve seen all there is to see”, Tooru sings happily.

On the other end of the line, Hajime groans.

Tooru lets his eyes fall closed again, listens to the water lapping at the tub and to the distant shuffle of papers, the occasional click of a pen, the small hitch in Hajime’s breath when he figures out something difficult. His limbs grow heavy. He sinks a little deeper into the bath.

“Remember when we were twelve and I went to Kyoto for a week with my parents?”

Hajime hums.

“I cried for a solid hour, in the car”, Tooru admits, thoughtfully. “I felt a little like that during the first week here. Not constantly, of course, but every now and then. Like everything that came between us was an intrusion from outside. A threat maybe. Or at least something unnecessary, or less important.”

Hajime is quiet, waiting for him to drive the point home. Tooru pushes the phone a little higher and dips his chin into the water.

“I think I’m getting it, though”, he says finally. “To be my own person.”

“I knew you would.” It’s warm, proud.

Hajime doesn’t say it back, but Tooru hears it anyway – hears it in the softer tone of Hajime’s voice, has heard it for weeks in the worry translated into question marks and good night texts, in those kinds of insults under Tooru’s selfies that mean Hajime saved them somewhere, in each small fact about his daily life that Hajime supplies to say _I want you here_. Hajime doesn’t say it back, but it’s okay, because Tooru always, always knows.

He ducks his face deeper into the water and holds his breath to contain whatever words want out. When he resurfaces, they are tamed into a question and an answer, already hesitant again.

“But do you know what?” Tooru leaves no pause, because if he does he will never continue. “I still miss you.”

Hajime’s inhale is the smallest thing.

“I still miss you, too.”

Tooru tastes water on the back of his throat, comes up too quickly and almost loses his phone, clamps Hajime’s laugh tightly to his ear and disconnects, to say it into the curve of the tub, the pale outline of his legs below the surface, just once before the phone rings again.

 

 

 

 

Tooru is the first one out of his seat and at the door. Maybe, maybe he is at the door thirty minutes before the train is scheduled to arrive. There is something unsteady in his stomach that makes him very aware of his own breathing, and his heart is sitting high in his throat; it fills his ears with a thrumming that mingles with rush of the train.

He leans against the wall, deliberately relaxing his shoulders. The small amount of time left stretches out along the tracks, feeling wider than all the months already behind him. He looks at the fields whizzing past, blurs of green and yellow ducked low under a whitish sky bearing down on them, always the same. The heat of late July lies shimmering over those broad, still planes of colour. Only the power poles signify that the train is actually covering a distance.

Tooru takes out his phone.

 

_You (13:17): is iwa-chan coming to get me??_

_Iwa-chan (13:20): Of course I am, idiot._

_You (13:22): meet me at the donut place ok? Itll be easier to find u there since iwa-chan is so small and easy to lose sight of in crowds~_

_Iwa-chan (13:24): I’m going to hit you_

_You (13:25): youre not bc you actually missed me_ _(´_ _∀_ _｀_ _)_ _♡_

_Iwa-chan (13:26): Whatever. Just come to the donut place, Kusokawa_

_You (13:26): o((*^_ _▽_ _^*))o_

When they reach Sendai Station about ten minutes later, Tooru gathers his bags and is out the doors the moment the gap is wide enough. He takes four, five steps towards the escalators, absently noticing that the crowd is not particularly thick and leaves paths easily discernible, and then he is running, sprinting to give in to the sudden rush of giddiness that demands an outlet more powerful than just the smile stretching the corners of his mouth. He’s breathing so easy, like an inhale could expand his lungs indefinitely with never a need to stop, just making him ever lighter.

He weaves his way across the platform, passes disgruntled businessmen, mothers clutching the hands of staggering children, students like himself, home for the holidays and hauling luggage, ducks around a briefcase brandished at eye level, slows briefly for the gates and emerges into the main hall, footsteps echoing above the ambient noise of high heels and suitcase wheels.

At the commotion, Hajime looks up from his phone and his expression dissolves, leaving something Tooru is unable to read from the rapidly closing distance between them. Instead he throws himself at Hajime, slowing just enough to keep them both from staggering backwards into the display of today’s specials (vanilla cream and sprinkles), and is wrapped in a hug. Moving to bury his face in the crook of Hajime’s neck, he catches sight of his bags strewn haphazardly over the floor. Hajime’s shoulders shake with a suppressed chuckle. Tooru holds on tighter, his eyes shut, and breathes in, in, in.

He takes a few heartbeats (erratic, rapid, loud) to assess the feeling that has steadily been building up pressure against his insides and finds it barely containable, like water seeping through solid walls, slow at first, but accumulating drop after hesitant drop, visible only in trickles, while clandestinely eroding stone and finally, with only seeming suddenness, rushing out, a wall of water falling, sweeping away all remnants of resistance. Or maybe it has long fallen and he is already amidst a current, wide, calm and strong and always there.

The words are out before he can stop them.

“Is now a good time?”

Hajime pulls back and tilts his head to look up at Tooru (Tooru loves, loves, loves the fact that Hajime can be shorter than him and still the strongest, steadiest and safest thing he knows. It takes his breath away a little bit, as does the way the light shifts on Hajime’s skin with the movement). He regards him calmly, eyes skimming Tooru’s face, dropping from his brow to eyes to nose to mouth (Tooru’s breath stutters), his own face softening almost indiscernibly. His eyes rest for a moment on the spot at Tooru’s throat where he can feel his pulse, staccato against skin. Tooru’s gaze follows the curve of Hajime’s lashes dark against his cheeks, jumps to the flash of his teeth catching his lower lip momentarily before letting go again.

It’s been a second, or maybe twenty, when their eyes meet again.

“Now is probably as good a time as any”, Hajime answers quietly.

The world doesn’t shift. The ground doesn’t shake, and yet that one passing moment pulses, thrums, Tooru thinks, there’s a tremor, a speeding up or slowing down of time, or maybe that’s just his heart. It’s minute; he sucks in a breath and they’re back to normal, two boys standing in a crowd, Tooru’s bags at their feet and the smell of donuts wafting over from the shop window.

His mind catches, supplies a blink of the sheer terror of that quiet April morning in their last year of middle school, of desperation and frantic lies and finally muted acceptance; and a part of him demands some sort of grand declaration, as recompense, as retribution. In the present, in the station, Hajime looks calm, his gaze steady and pulling Tooru back in, back down with reassurance. Tooru thinks of the transitory days after graduation, of somehow knowing, with dizzying certainty, of that unspoken promise; thinks of smoothly falling into step with an unhurried pace, of his eyes meeting Hajime’s in a smudged train window and all his unease leaving him as if with an exhale, as inevitable and as unnoticed.

He wants to lay his forehead on Hajime’s shoulder, quiet with gratitude.

His eyes burn; the corners of his mouth are trembling. His heart so heavy from a monumental change it insists to bear. With an effort, he pushes the moment’s magnitude away, shakes the barely forming wetness from his eyes with a quick motion, and reaches for the lightness in the air, the smell of train tracks running under a boundless sky, of change, of coming home. Someone’s suitcase bumps into his heel and sends him tumbling forward, when did they let go of each other? Hajime’s hand is there, steady on his arm, and Tooru laughs.

It’s an involuntary sound, sheer happiness straining free. The magnitude lurks just out of reach, a wave miraculously delayed, poised to attack. It would be oh so easy to let it come crashing down, but Hajime is speaking, and Tooru would always rather listen to him than to his own emotions stirring up their storms.

“Hey”, Hajime says, “you’re not crying.”

It’s half statement of fact, half reassurance – and just like that, Tooru is safe.

“I’m not”, he agrees. Just like that, the lightness is firmly within reach, and he holds on with both hands. Lets a mischievous smile pull at his mouth with just an edge of a challenge, watches Hajime’s eyes follow the movement.

“So, Iwaizumi Hajime”, Tooru starts, cocking his head and drawing the syllables out to a little more than their full length, into singsong.

“Oh no”, Hajime says, backing away.

“I really, really like you. Will you go out with me?”

It was meant as a joke, perhaps uttered with the desire to see Hajime blush (perhaps, deep, deep down, uttered because Tooru will always take more reassurance). But somehow, his voice slipped from its teasing lilt into something raw, maybe because the words burned their way up his throat like that, and now his face feels hot, the air feels hot, and everything he’s wearing feels a size too small. He intertwines his fingers and barely avoids shuffling his feet. Again one, maybe two seconds stretch into infinity.

Then Hajime huffs a low laugh. “I take it back. Anything to watch you implode like that.”

“Iwa-chan!”, Tooru cries, indignant. “This was the most embarrassing thing I’ve _ever_ done _, at least_ indulge me!”

This gets a full laugh, and Tooru isn’t even angry, just warm all over. He buries his face in his hands.

“You’re such an idiot”, Hajime says, and then, over Tooru’s sharp inhale and already bending to pick up Tooru’s bags, “yeah, I will. Now come on, let’s get your stuff home.”

It should be impossible to feel even warmer. There is a small blush creeping up the back of Hajime’s neck, just shy of his collar. Tooru wants to trace it, now that he is allowed, wants to lay his index finger on that line between two warm colours and watch it rise under his skin.

He skips after Hajime’s retreating back and reaches for the bags that dangle from his left hand.

“Give me these”, he says, “so you can hold my hand.”

Hajime does.

They walk out of the station with their fingers linked, pulse pressed to pulse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really hope you enjoyed reading this little study! I certainly had a great time writing it, and I hope that shows a little. Feel free to come yell at me about Iwaoi feelings or find me on [tumblr](http://rauchblauwrites.tumblr.com/); I'm always happy about more people to share my infatuation with :D 
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has left kudos or even comments, each of which has honestly made my day - you guys are lovely <3


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